Category Archives: Vincent Johnson

The Four-Hour Art Week? Read Carol Bove’s Self-Help Guide for Artists

The sculptor Carol Bove likes to play with associations and forms as she builds her assemblages of constructed and readymade objects. Time and space to experiment are crucial elements of her process, as is a certain psychological sovereignty—Bove writes that “creating a nonpurposive, free space in which to play and have fun is essential.” Here, the Brooklyn-based artist gives her best advice for finding happiness (rather than “succeeding”) as an artist, excerpted in its entirety from the new book AKADEMIE X: Lesson in Art + Life.

WORK

Years ago, from 1995–2000, I used to live in an illegal loft building under the Manhattan Bridge. It was one of the few artists’ buildings in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) at the time, and it was known for its ridiculous DIY door buzzers. On the ground floor was a paper recycling plant and there were always clouds of flies. There must have been more than a hundred people living there, along with lots of dogs and other pets. One loft housed a black-market exotic animal dealer. When he was busted, people claimed to have seen a kangaroo, but all I ever saw, when he once held the front door open for me, was a box full of prairie dogs.

A friend of mine lived upstairs and he was photographing a special breed of butterfly that he’d mail-ordered in advance of his participation at the Venice Biennale. He was planning to make a butterfly garden there. While he was out getting lunch one day, a neighbor’s cat hunted and killed every one of his subjects. It was a disaster for him, but I couldn’t help laughing, even though I think of myself as a very kind and sympathetic friend. It was just so thrilling that this art-studio problem was so common, primal, fragile, fantastical, violent, and yet silly, all at the same time. It makes me laugh even now as I’m writing. A cat hunting butterflies is a much clearer, more available image of the drama of a studio emergency than “I overworked my painting.”

Two German girls lived in the loft next to mine and I overheard them talking one day. I wasn’t eavesdropping – the old industrial building was crudely constructed to begin with and the additions were all makeshift, so noise traveled. For several months the sounds in my studio consisted of someone sculpting with a chainsaw (upstairs), continuous jazz practice (downstairs), and the German girls talking (next door). I only understood a few words of German at the time. I knew the word for work: arbeit. So as they talked I would hear a string of syllables and then this word, arbeit … another string of syllables, arbeit … string of syllables, arbeit … I couldn’t believe how much they used the word. And I wondered to myself if I used that word as often.

I decided to stop using the word “work” as an experiment. It was very difficult! I had to compensate by substituting a more specific description of the activity. For example, instead of “I’m going to my studio to work,” I’d have to say, “I’m going to make some drawings.” Or instead of “I’m going to work around the house,” I’d have to say, “I’m going to clean the kitchen and fold some laundry.” I discovered that the absence of the word ‘work’ forced me to reconsider assumptions about leisure, because the idea of work implied its opposite. I let go of the notion that I deserved a certain amount of downtime from being productive or from being active. The labour/leisure dichotomy became uncoupled and then dissolved. I couldn’t use labour to allay guilt or self-punish or feel superior. Work didn’t exist, so all the psychological payoff of work for work’s sake had nowhere to go.

WHAT IS AN ARTIST’S ACTIVITY IF IT’S NOT WORK?

I started to adjust my thinking about productivity so that it was no longer valued in and of itself. It strikes me as vulgar always to have to apply a cost/benefit analysis to days lived; it’s like understanding an exchange of gifts only as barter. The work exercise made me feel as if I was awakening from one of the spells of capitalism. And there was more to it than that: I was able to begin the process of withdrawal from my culture’s ideology around the instrumentality of time, i.e. that you can use time. I think the ability to withdraw from consensus reality is one of the most important skills for an artist to learn because it helps her to recognize invisible forces.

TIME AND INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Your time is not a separate thing from you; it’s not an instrument. Time is part of what you’re made from. Emerson said, “A man is what he thinks about all day long.” Everything that you do and think about is going to be in your artwork. The computer-science idea “garbage in, garbage out” applies to artists. This is something to consider when you’re choosing your habitual activities.

One question is, how do you create a way of being in the world that allows new things (ideas, information, people, places) into your life without letting everything in? I want to point out that your tolerance for media saturation might be lower than you realize. You need to conduct an open-ended search that doesn’t overwhelm you with information and at the same time doesn’t limit the search in a way that pre-determines your findings. That is a puzzle.

The first self-help book I want to recommend is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. This book is based on the idea of artistic recovery, similar to Alcoholics Anonymous, but it’s recovery for a stuck artist. I don’t consider myself stuck, but I still get a lot out of most of the exercises. Cameron addresses the idea of work and to a certain extent, information management, but the book came out in 1992, before the internet really came into our lives. She understands the creative process and how to teach it; the techniques she describes work. I know what you’re thinking: “Carol, I’m scared. That sounds New Agey.” I can’t promise you that it will help you or that you will like it or that your friends won’t tease you for reading it. But I can promise that it won’t diminish your critical faculties, or your intellectual ability, or your access to rational thought or anything like that. If you’re scared or squeamish about New Agey sounding books, I say that’s all the more reason to read them. A willingness to take psychological risks is another one of the most important skills for an artist to develop.

The other self-help book I want to recommend is Tim Ferris’s The 4-Hour Workweek. What’s the opposite of New Agey? Hiring a virtual assistant in India to take care of your everyday tasks, as Ferris recommends. I didn’t take that particular piece of advice, but his techniques for time-management, dealing with information overload and email addiction are really helpful. I also liked some of his ideas regarding income automation.

UNCENSORING

Before I went to New York University to get my bachelor’s degree, and after an initial attempt at art school that only lasted a semester, I took several years off. I quickly realized in my first attempt that at the rate I was going there was way I was going to be transformed into an artist by the school and that I’d be better off waiting till I was ready to apply myself. It was a wise decision, but it didn’t come from intellect; I simply knew in an urgent, emotional way that I wasn’t capable of getting anything out of the classroom at that time. I was lucky that my parents didn’t pressure me to complete school. On the contrary; they were paying for it and reasoned that if I couldn’t get straight As in the first semester of art school I was wasting their money. (Here’s something that strikes me as very different now from back then in 1988: in those days, going to art school wasn’t considered a reasonable thing to do. The reasonable people went into graphic design or architecture or something with a practical application. Art school was for irresponsible freakazoids with no plan. Or you could say, romantics. Now, it seems as if there’s a perception that going to art school is part of a clear career path that you can follow towards a respectable profession. The market is bigger and can support more people, sure, but if it seems as if there is a clear path, that’s an illusion. Academicism, professionalism, bureaucracy, and officialdom are all toxic to artmaking. They are necessary interference and shaping obstacles, not facilitators.)

Going back to school was great – after fourteen semesters off, I was ready. The worst part about being back in school was making art and having to explain it at the same time. It made it impossible for me to feel safe when experimenting. As a consequence of my profound self-doubt and insecurity, I was censoring what I really felt compelled to make, reasoning that since I was stupid, whatever I truly wanted to make would be stupid. I thought I would be better off faking it.

As soon as I got out of school, I was very curious to know what exactly it was that I was censoring, because the repression was so assiduous that I had absolutely no idea what it might be. I decided to try an experiment. I would make whatever I wanted for three months with the understanding that I would not show what I dredged up. Not to anyone. But I felt the need to discover my secret.

I can tell you now, since a lot of time has passed, that I discovered I wanted to draw portraits of pretty women. It seemed dumb at first, but I was patient and nonjudgmental and just let my desire take me wherever it wanted to go, and that’s been my modus operandi ever since.

Creating a nonpurposive, free space in which to play and have fun is essential. You can tell when you’re looking at art that was a drag to make: it’s a drag to look at. On the other hand, it’s thrilling to watch someone work through a problem that’s exciting for him, even if the subject matter wouldn’t normally move you.

I’ve watched kids playing with exciting, fun toys like bubble guns – they’re good for ten minutes. But something like a doctor’s kit that allows them to rehearse the drama of their lives is inexhaustibly interesting; they’ll carry it everywhere for months. Your art should be like that kind of toy. It may be an intellectual project, but it needs to be invested with your psychic life and driven by emotional necessity.

This uncensoring exercise was so helpful for me. I recommend it. I did it in my late twenties, when I already had some education and experience and I was trying to find an authentic way to respond to all the ideas and artworks that already existed or that were coming into existence around me.

RHYTHM OF WORKING

The format of school dictates a certain rhythm or pace of working. In the same way that in the Law and Order universe a murderer needs to be caught and brought to justice in roughly fifty minutes, artworks need to be completed and critiqued during the semester. I get the feeling that people set their speed in school and then it’s reinforced by the art-fair schedule, and with the multiplying venues, our ability to fly cheaply and send high-res images instantly, everything is accelerating. But it’s up to you to decide whether or not your work benefits from that pace. I always find Jay DeFeo’sThe Rose inspiring when I need a reminder that it doesn’t have to happen so fast.

MONEY

Becoming an artist is not a good business plan.

GETTING A CAREER

I’m assuming you want to be an artist for life. I can see that people in their twenties have a lot of anxiety when their peers are showing and they’re not, and I worried about that too. But I understand now that it’s not a race and I wish I hadn’t wasted all that energy worrying. In almost every instance I can think of, getting off to an early start hasn’t been an advantage to artists’ careers. You probably shouldn’t even get serious about showing your work in a commercial context until you’re close to thirty. Until then, it’s best to observe. While you’re learning how the art world works, keep the stakes low. That’s to say, keep the career stakes low. It’s never the wrong time to embrace psychological risk.

I’ve just more or less equated selling with career, but those things are not equivalent and it’s obviously more complicated than that. The Gift: The Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, a book by Lewis Hyde, has been particularly helpful for me in adopting the right attitude to releasing artworks into the market. It contains an analysis of gift economies that develops a picture of unalienated labour. The first half of the book, which looks at gift-giving practices in tribal society and in folklore, has shaped my thinking even more than the treatments on artistic expression in the second half.

HISTORY

You do need to know some art history. As a producer of art objects/gestures, the conventions you decide to ignore and the conventions you decide to repeat are as important, if not more so, than what you invent. If you’re a total novice start with Cubism to Surrealism and then study 1945–75, then take it from there.

Everybody my age read Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. If you ever want to understand something about our subconscious, our unarticulated assumptions, you could get some clues from that book. The theory of the 1980s is important for the very reason that it formed our mentality, but it has receded from our conscious thoughts. The subconscious realm of unarticulated assumptions is a powerful, invisible shaping force in the world.

FINDING YOURSELF

Artwork comes from the total personality: ego, self, id, conscious and unconscious, transpersonal, linguistic and nonlinguistic, historically determined, sensual, emotional, physical, mental, ideological, and cultural. I believe that in order to make something that’s meaningful you have to start by figuring yourself out psychologically. In order to figure myself out I’ve applied different modes of critique such as Marxism, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, history, ayurvedic principles, philosophy, Feldenkrais technique, anthropology, astrology, the physiology of perception, contemplating life as a caveman, health-food regimens, psychedelic experiences, reading self-help books, ebay, falling in love, practicing magical rites, teaching, the scientific method, psychotherapy, yoga, meditation, and dharmic traditions, fasting and other austerities, exercise, napping, resonance repatterning, literature and poetry, friendships, parenting, humour, and countless others. Artwork is self-expression, and clearly I’m talking about a notion of self that radiates far outside of one’s body or even one’s time.

Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is completely different every time I read it. He’s making a projection about what will happen as a result of images becoming reproducible, and we have to use all of our powers of imagination to dismantle our media environment for long enough to know what he must have meant. And then we compare this reflection to the text measured against our own time. I also often come back to one line from the essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

Maccarone
September 7 to October 19, 2013
630 Greenwich Street
New York City, 212-431-4977

Installation view of Carol Bove, RA, or Why is an orange like a bell? Photo Credit: EPW Studio/Maris Hutchinson. Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone, New York.

Carol Bove does not consider her art in terms of its site-specificity, which might come as a surprise considering her recent projects for institutions such as the Highline and the Museum of Modern Art. Hers is a more holistic approach to site specificity as a call-and-response between a sculpture, its materials, and the surrounding environment. In an interview with Art in America in May 2012, Bove explains: “My sculptures can and must be taken apart and then put back together. Disaggregation is important. Therefore, each element needs to maintain its individual identity, its autonomy.” This is why I find it particularly worrisome that the press releases and texts in situ introducing two of her ongoing sculpture installations in New York City, Caterpillar at the Highline Park (through May 2014) and Equinox at MoMA (through January 2014), recommend allegorical interpretations of the art based solely on their material or textual components.

It is Bove’s solo show at Maccarone, her second with the gallery, titled RA, or Why is an orange like a bell? that most thoroughly escapes this trap of over interpretation. The work in all three exhibitions share materials: concrete, brass, cast steel, and powder-finished steel; unlike the outdoor installation on the Highline and the show at MoMA, the gallery pieces are not physically bolted down and hence not corralled by a specific space and its host of references. RA, or Why is an orange like a bell? confounds traditional notions of artistic authorship and object category. Only six of the twelve works listed are attributed to Bove herself, who regularly folds the works of others into her own shows in what she calls “forced collaborations.” Among Bove’s six works, a large percentage of the materials were industrially fabricated or found, and their identity as “artworks” is complicated by this sense of previous history. Just past the gallery’s entrance is one of Bove’s simplest and most eloquent works—an untitled sculpture in the round, made in 2013, in which a slab of petrified wood is fastened to one edge of a steel beam towering almost a dozen feet tall. Here, the support structure is an essential armature, and the fossilized organism an animated protagonist in comparison.

One of her most virtuosic displays is Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep (2013). The work consists of delicate brass open cubes and rectangles screwed into intricate formations and woven into the openings of a concrete pillar. Even though not all the shapes implemented are regular cubes, the edges of both materials contribute to the contours of a regular grid when viewed straight on. As one walks around the piece, however, the tidy geometry ebbs into formal chaos before straightening itself again. The same could be said of her two white powder coated steel sculptures, Solar Feminine and Hieroglyph (both 2013), whose forms yawn and contract when observed in rotation, and I-Beam Sculpture (2013), which is set low to the ground and becomes nearly indistinct from it at certain angles. In all these works, Bove’s aforementioned notion of disaggregation is not merely a physical phenomenon, but an optical one.

The remaining works in the presentation were made by Lionel and Joanne Ziprin, Harry Smith, Richard Berger, and other unnamed members of their Lower East Side bohemian circle from the 1950s and ‘60s. Their contributions include a glass vitrine of anonymous doodles, scraps, and more complete works on paper (ca. 1951-1955). These, the list of works informs us, are not meant to be scrutinized for their content, but to be “illustrative of the creative atmosphere of the Ziprin circle”—much in the way the books in Bove’s iconic George Nelson shelf sculptures operate as cultural indicators rather than texts. The centerpiece of the show, if such a work exists, is Harry Smith’s Design for Qor Corporation (ca. 1960), a diminutively sized painting on cardboard sporting a brash red and green grid-like pattern with Celtic affinity. It is suspended high between two large panes of glass—a two-dimensional vitrine—such that one can’t look at the Smith painting without seeing other works in periphery. In a brilliant multi-dimensional play, this work is at once a motif, a shadow, and a physical intervention, imprinted upon the show without leaving an actual trace.

The artist does not make explicit why she chose the Ziprin circle’s works to feature alongside her own. The choice was certainly not incidental or merely aesthetic; in conjunction with her Maccarone show, Bove co-curated with Philip Smith a reading-room of Ziprin and Harry Smith ephemera a few blocks away at 98 Morton Street. In this appendix-like exhibition are works from the duo’s short-lived design company Qor Collective and other eccentric commercial projects like Inkweed Studios. When Lionel Ziprin passed away in 2009, he left behind an epic volume of poetry, which included the autobiographical lines: “I am not an artist. I am not an / outsider. I am a citizen of the / republic and I have remained / anonymous all the time by choice.” Nine years ago, Bove offered a companion statement in an interview with the curator Beatrix Ruf: “It has to be apparent that the piece was put together for this particular occasion, in this particular space, which exists in a particular cultural context at a particular moment in time. […] The objects are assembled from non-art objects and my fantasy is that they could return to a state of non-art.”

The show probably leaves room for an essay to be written about the link between Ziprin and co.’s Kabbalistic undertakings and the spiritual inflections in Bove’s titles, but I believe that it is unwise to give too much emphasis to cross-interpretation. Rather than looking at either body of work as an index, allegory, and appendage to the other, we should regard RA as a staged meeting of kindred objects that we are invited to observe before everything disbands again

Carol Bove and Steven Claydon

Material fidelity

Carol Bove: The editor who commissioned this conversation suggested we might talk about modernism, but I’m not really thinking about modernism anymore, or anyway not particularly.

Steven Claydon: I have similar misgivings about modernism and what is expected of one’s practice. I was trying to figure out my own brief flirtation with the idea and realized it provided an expedient vessel from which to address a wider set of issues. I was thinking about your work and it seems to me that your relationship with modernism was very autobiographical and reflected a particular set of impressions from growing up in Berkeley during a kind of swan-song period in modernism. I like that you mentioned science fiction, as the genre fulfills a similar role for me, considering a future projection as cherished memory. I find it puzzling that science fiction can sometimes assume a role of actualized experience for people. Expectations of the future can also influence industry and policy.

I have been trying to wrestle with the notion of “material fidelity,” something distinct from truth to materials, and I suppose a notion that also allows for a kind of “material infidelity” or even treachery with the things one makes. What do you think in relation to your work?

CB: I like the idea of material infidelity or treachery. The feeling from the word ‘treachery’ rings with some of the dark tones in your work. I played with the dialectic of authenticity and fraudulence for a while, which is either the same problem or one with a lot of attachment points. I couldn’t define authentic art without cornering myself and eventually I got exhausted from the chase. Fraudulence is a little easier to approach. You can’t talk about “truth in materials” because it’s unfashionable, and besides, that discussion comes with a lot of historical baggage. Or simply said, it’s a historical idea. Doesn’t the understanding that materials are already heavily implicated take part in “material fidelity”?

SC: Authenticity and truth is an impossible territory and, as you said, consigned to history. We could, however, contemplate the potential of art catalyzing an original encounter. I think certain thinkers were referring to this when they talk about truth and authenticity. I am also more reconciled to the artwork as a sort of prop or vehicle for the suspension of disbelief. Could you ever see that as a useful way of considering your own work?

CB: Your use of the word ‘prop’ leads me to alternating images of your work, first as a makeshift scaffold in relation to a human form and then as a stage-bound object that is the most succinct expression of an alternate reality. One of my great attractions to becoming a cultivated art viewer is the practice I get in taking mutually exclusive positions. To be concrete I would mention The Oracle, a sculpture I made earlier this year. With a sculpture like that I think about corporate lobby art, a Roman bust, a Brancusi, the display of fragmented antiquities at the Metropolitan Museum and shells as interior design motifs.

SC: The Oracle was, for me, the defining piece in your show at Kimmerich last year in New York. I have for a long time considered this a-parallel approach to be the only appropriate way to construe my own things as that is how I perceive others. I see it as a climate of these discrete properties and narrative trajectories that describe an orbit around an errant core. Joseph Conrad talked about narrative in a similar way when he refers to the “yarns of seamen.” Conrad likens a tale to a nut; the story weaves itself around its subject to form a shell that smothers the kernel and never refers directly to it but recalls the kernel by allusion.

CB: Conrad’s nut is such a good image for what you’re doing. I wanted to recall the conversation we had a few years ago, concerning assistant use, etc. I’ve been asking myself, is this the kind of artist I want to be, i.e., somebody who runs a small production shop? I had more of an image of taking mushrooms in a cave in North Africa when this vocation hailed me.

SC: Believe me, I would love to accommodate some of that beatnik stuff again, but once you get started, expedience dictates that you have a responsibility to your profession that often precludes hedonism.

CB: I often feel I’m neglecting my responsibility to the world through my wanton capitulation to market demands. And that’s not to set practical considerations at odds with a romantic ideal, but accepting the market as part of the world that the work inhabits. Not incidental, but essential to the objects themselves. I think about working into the primitive zone of commerce, appealing to the desire to consume and possess as a way to set ideas loose into the world. It’s a little perverted. But then it’s the perverted feeling that makes it seem interesting, and I go back in the shop instead of working on something less tangible. Part of “material fidelity” is bringing together combinations of materials, which might be matter but might also take the form of shapes or finishes, to arouse a feeling of inappropriate sexuality. The materials need to have integrity as individual elements to aggregate with erotic effect. And unfortunately “expensive looking” is one of the tones that turns me on.

SC: I’d like to pick up on your thoughts concerning the role of seduction, surface, etc. There is a danger of importing or appropriating fully fledged material with the aesthetic intact, and I can think of a number of artists who are in the curious position of being seduced by the subject matter they set out to critique. Having said that, there is something vital in sailing too close to the spectacle and entertaining the specter of style. There are multiple aspect ratios at play here. I think I can detect these strategies at play in your work. I see no contradiction in combining wistful or poetic notions of transformation with a more removed, academic or less esoteric position.

Carol Bove, “The Oracle” (2010). Courtesy of the Artist and Kimmerich, New York.

CB: I’m interested in critique and seduction — that is certainly part of it. Why bother working with materials you don’t care about? I think my incorporation of hubris is about critique and seduction. For reasons unknown to me I was drawn again and again to Philip Johnson situations. Those explorations were sort of like a flirtation with an older man — I admired him but at the same time found him adorable and ridiculous. The specter of style sounds appealingly sinister, and I’m all for style generally because I don’t consider it a superficial addition to a thing, but more that the outward aspect is expressing the inner meaning. We are both using these evaporated pedestal forms. Mine are all straight rectangular prisms but yours sometimes have more complicated faceting. What are those forms?

SC: The more complex pedestals were a reference to the Pythagorean cult. Comprising twelve facets, they describe a dodecahedron. We naturally assume that mathematics has a bias toward logic and explication, but to the Pythagoreans it was very different. They saw it as unraveling a mystic code for the Divine plan. This newly deduced information was deemed to be so potent and potentially destructive in the wrong hands that certain equations were suppressed and only revealed to initiates. The most powerful of these equations being the dodecahedron. I am interested in pre-ethical/pre-Socratic philosophy for its amazing invention, speculation and compound nature. Having said all of that, the dodecahedron was a concurrent component of the work but not a concluding definition. I was interested in what you were saying about how one can subtly alter a material through our own conception. Subjectivity has a very strong influence over the status of material and visa-versa. That is for me the vacillation between what Heidegger described as the ‘earth’ and the ‘world’ of a thing.

CB: Have you read Moby Dick?

SC: Yes, that book is an inexhaustible mine of material; It’s as diffuse, layered, simple and complex as zoo-plankton, phytoplankton, krill and other unwilling creatures filtering through the baleen plates of a great cetacean. I get bleary eyed just watching Jaws. Anything maritime has a quasi-religious effect on me. As Ian Hamilton Finlay once said, “Who couldn’t love boats?” I think you could genuinely read that book backwards or rearrange the chapters and construe the narrative by smell. How much do you think that your maritime location in Red Hook [a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York] has influenced your work, and to what extent should one allow outside or local influence into a practice?

CB: I really like this question because it’s gotten me thinking about… how to put it? Accepting something suspicious about my artwork. Sometimes I’ve thought that my interest in the ’60s is some version of identity politics, like the worst part of identity politics that would reduce whatever you make to your demographic. It’s confining and deterministic. My living near the water now or my growing up in Berkeley in the ’70s is all part of a larger event. It seems correct that my experience is what my work is going to be made of.

SC: There are a few artists that I have met from an early age through chance encounters, establishing mixed relationships with their work. My wavering opinions have subsequently effected my development as an artist; an experience most artists confront, I’m sure. It goes back to the notion of autobiography in partnership with historical perspective and research. One of these artists, Charles Simonds, I had the pleasure to meet after I curated a show that included a one-off piece. I started to think that perhaps there was some kind of voodoo conspiracy at work with Charles’s work. I would discover Charles Simonds catalogues wherever I went and often in the most unlikely places; sun bleached by the Seine or staring at me in a thrift store or palace. That kind of relationship with an artist’s work could not have developed in a more academic, retrospective way.

CB: Normally you invent objects based on… based on what? For myself I apply this ethos of non-invention, so that what I’m doing with objects is more like framing. Even when I’m inventing, like physically sculpting material into a form that didn’t exist before, I think of it as non-invention because the forms feel familiar. What you are doing is similar, but not exactly the same.

SC: In the second chapter of Guignol’s Band (1944) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the author casually makes an allusion to an area of London’s East End called Trom, somewhere near Whitechapel. It is a totally fictitious place, an invention. The bell project sprang from a kind of revelry inspired by the heterogeneous nature of the East End of London. Céline describes the constant booming of Big Ben highlighting the underlying violent change inherent in the city. This stirred up my childhood vision of the docklands of London as an endless bombsite. I tried to imagine where Trom might be; Trom for me was and is in the area directly under St. Paul’s Church, Bow Common. The external bell and frame bother me. Exposed like balls peeping from swimming trunks. Semi-secular. Trom bell is a real question mark. I elaborated and stitched the bell into a number of scenarios as an obscure motif for disorientation. The amnesiac bell: autonomous, self-questioning and obsolete. Self-ringing, an alarm clock with no time zone or ritual application, rung by the random events that set up temporary orbit around it. Scoop it up with the rest of the silly signifiers. Melt it down! Make it suffer.

CB: I think I smell the plot! This is your material in/fidelity and your narrative. Atmosphere. Like some fertile substance that can accumulate, like orgone* but sometimes dusty orgone.

SC: At one point we were discussing certain forms of magic that require an appropriated item from the subject of a spell to increase the efficacy. Sometimes these would be treated (Duchamp’s assisted ready-made) or buried under the floor of the unwitting target. What do you think?

CB: I have had some funny experiences that make me think they’re spells.

* Note: ‘Orgone’ is the term used by the late Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich in the late ’30s to describe the energy that permeates all known matter everywhere in every galaxy, the ether to which gravity and magnetism are bound. It is akin to words describing phenomena such as chi, prana, life’s energy or even the Freudian concept of libido.

Carol Bove was born in 1971 in Geneva, Switzerland. She lives and works in New York.

Carol Bove

Carol Bove’s considerable reputation rests upon more than a decade’s worth of refined and culturally literate artworks. Her early sculptural installations, often taking the form of plinths or wall-mounted shelves laden with period books and knick-knacks, evoke memories of 1960s- and ’70s-era bohemianism, and the individual and societal soul-searching that accompanied the period’s wrenching social transformations. That many viewers have no firsthand experience of that historical moment and know it only through publications, films and other cultural objects is part of Bove’s point. Born in 1971 in Geneva, Switzerland, and raised in Berkeley, Calif., she too experienced this cultural ferment at a remove, filtered as it was by the preferences of her parents and their milieu. Because of this, her ability to capture what seems like the essence of the era results as much from an understanding of how we construct history as from a feeling for the lived texture of the time. Her deft juxtapositions-of Playboy centerfold images, paperback copies of Eastern mystical writings and Western psychological treatises-both frame a worldview and reveal the act of framing.

Bove came to New York during the mid-1990s and graduated from New York University in 2000. She began exhibiting immediately thereafter, and her carefully calibrated arrangements of objects were widely acclaimed. In the ensuing years, Bove has broadened the range of materials she works with, the forms her artworks take and the historical antecedents she repurposes. Though “the ’60s” (a time not coterminous with the 1960s) remain a touchstone and one of the period’s emblematic art movements, Minimalism, a preferred esthetic framework, today her art has been drained of much of its cultural specificity. Bringing together materials both luxurious (peacock feathers, gold chains) and rough-hewn (driftwood, steel), Bove has elaborated an esthetic at once unique and capable of rehabilitating artistic precedents that have fallen into disfavor.

The artist works in a large studio a few blocks from the industrial waterfront in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The location is important: she scavenges urban detritus from her immediate environs, and produces work in collaboration with artisans whose machine shops are within walking distance of her building. At present she is working on her first two large-scale outdoor commissions. One sculpture will be exhibited in Kassel, Germany, from June 9 to Sept. 16 as part of Documenta 13, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. The other will be presented later this year at a New York City location that is yet to be announced. The edited transcript of our conversation, which took place at her studio in February, begins in medias res as Bove describes her plans for this latter work.

CAROL BOVE The installation [in New York] will have a platform featuring a totemic sculpture-a huge I-beam with a log attached to it. It’s a 16-million-year-old piece of petrified wood. At first glance it seems like a normal object; it looks like regular wood, so pedestrian as to be almost disappointing. Then, as you touch the material, you discover that in places it’s broken like a rock. You begin to understand what it is.

The platform has another element, my attempt at generic sculpture. I wanted to make something complicated, like tangled spaghetti, out of a material that has a different texture. That part will be made out of tubular steel and appear almost sinuous, though with an awkwardness because I’m making it out of half circles joined together. In a way it’s diametrically opposed to the petrified wood. It’s shiny, hard, smooth, industrially produced; its horizontal orientation balances out the composition as well. I hope that this sculpture will engage the city in both material and temporal registers.

BRIAN SHOLIS What has it been like to scale up your work and, given the unpredictable circumstances of the setting, to build for contingencies?

BOVE It’s totally, totally different from what I’m used to. Most of the time I’m very dependent upon everyone in the exhibition space taking care of the work, ensuring that no one touches things . . . and now I have to think about the work being rained on, or people climbing on it.

SHOLIS Is it difficult to accommodate yourself to that?

BOVE No, it has actually been stimulating to revisit my early experiences of outdoor sculpture, to realize how formative and exciting they were.

SHOLIS In the past you’ve mentioned childhood experiences playing with the Arnaldo Pomodoro sculpture on the Berkeley campus.

BOVE Yes, the sculpture garden at the Berkeley Art Museum was very important to me. It does not exist now-I think because of earthquake concerns. Anyway, later I had the idea that outdoor sculpture was simplistic because of its need to be accessible, and now I’m realizing how wrong I was about that. There is something fascinating about placing out in the world an object with no instrumental purpose, something provocative about the gesture.

SHOLIS How far have you traveled along a path from, on the one hand, artworks that require knowledge of cultural references to, on the other, artworks that are easily accessible?

BOVE In terms of how I conceive of the work’s intellectual contexts, I don’t think there’s a big difference between my gallery shows and my new outdoor projects. In both instances I’m interested in the open-endedness of the situation. In an outdoor environment, especially one used for numerous other purposes, viewers’ initial indifference requires something different of the artist, a novel way to hook people. The benefit, of course, is that viewers don’t come to the work with preconceived ideas of what it should be or do. How can an artist communicate through a public artwork, even on an unconscious level? These are interesting questions to try to answer.

SHOLIS You’ve been conceiving this piece for New York at the same time as you’ve been creating a work for Documenta. Are they going to be on view at the same time?

BOVE That was the original plan; now I think they won’t.

SHOLIS I ask because I think of your exhibitions as exquisite compositions in which each work relates to every other work. Is that how you’re thinking of them here?

BOVE Well, I hadn’t thought explicitly of setting up a circuit between the two sculptures. But I was thinking of them together. The work for Germany will be situated on the grounds of the Orangerie in Kassel and will follow their compositional strategy. Everything there is placed in a line, so what I’m creating will be stiffly in line with another statue that’s already there.

SHOLIS And what kind of elements will it have?

BOVE It will have the same kind of elements [as the New York piece]: a totemic sculpture incorporating petrified wood, as well as another abstract component, this time a network of variously scaled cubes in bronze and steel. I want it to function for viewers at a distance and to have details fascinating enough to hold the attention of someone who has come closer to it. An additional platform I’m creating in this case, however, will stand apart from the rest of the work and have nothing resting on it.

SHOLIS Can you tell me a little bit about the Orangerie?

BOVE The venue is an 18th-century building with extensive grounds. Off to both sides of the main garden are hedged-in spaces I think of as outdoor rooms, in the center of which are statues. One is Apollo and the other is Flora. I wanted Apollo; I felt the Apollonian context would be a nice contrast to some of my works’ elements. But I didn’t get him. I’m OK with Flora, of course. It’s a strange space; it feels kind of metaphysical.

SHOLIS Has this been a rewarding enough experience that you would consider making more outdoor work?

BOVE Yes, it has been great, and I’m really into it. I’m excited by having to work with the viewer indifference I described earlier. I have enjoyed making works that need to be complete in themselves, that don’t need an engaged viewer. It has seemed to me like an opportunity to try and communicate with the unconscious realm.

SHOLIS Can you discuss your relationship to Berkeley, where you grew up?

BOVE There are wonderful hills and parks in Berkeley, but I also always loved the city’s more industrial areas.

SHOLIS Near the water?

BOVE Yes. Even as a teenager, making artworks-my juvenilia, I guess—I was really attracted to industrial districts. I collected rusty junk. Decades later I realized, “Oh, I’m still doing what I did as a teenager.” The use I make of these materials is different but the impulse is consistent.

I have a kind of romantic attraction to liminal spaces. I feel they are underappreciated. They feel wild, and the lack of care for them is attractive to me. Somehow I identify it with 1930s-era Farm Security Administration photographs-shabby America.

SHOLIS So it’s the atmosphere surrounding the materials more than the act of rescuing. You’re not a hoarder?

BOVE [laughs] No, I’m not obsessive-compulsive. I’m not a collector; I don’t like to hold on to things. I spend time with them and then allow them to continue their lives elsewhere.

SHOLIS Though it’s a very carefully thought out path that you set them on.

BOVE Right. For now, at least. But down the road they may end up un-becoming sculpture. I can imagine them losing their sculptural form. In a way, I build for this. My sculptures can and must be taken apart and then put back together. Disaggregation is important. Therefore, each element needs to maintain its individual identity, its autonomy.

SHOLIS The majority of the sculptures you’ve made are, right now, in a disaggregated state. They’re in museum storage or collectors’ storage.

BOVE They are resting [laughs]. They don’t have to be sculpture all the time. The ones that are put together, that are performing . . . well, knowing that they are out there takes some kind of energy out of me, psychic energy.

SHOLIS That’s perfectly understandable. Let’s return to the topic of place, this time Red Hook. Of all the neighborhoods in New York City in which I can imagine you living and working, this one seems the most appropriate. It’s the most weathered, it’s an aging industrial waterfront. Is that important to your practice?

BOVE Yes, totally. Like the Berkeley waterfront, it’s another site of American industrial decline, which fascinates me. The neighborhood is separate from the rest of Brooklyn, divided from it by a highway; it functions as a kind of hideout. I wasn’t looking, but when I found the building in which I now live I immediately thought, “OK, this is my house.” A close friend from Berkeley saw it and said, “You’ve moved back to Berkeley.”

SHOLIS If you moved to another part of New York would your work change?

BOVE Probably. I worry about moving. My materials are so much a part of this particular environment. My processes are also specific to the particular fabricators whose shops are in this neighborhood. I feel very attached to where I am.

SHOLIS Do you adapt your ideas to the skills possessed by the craftsmen you work with?

BOVE Yes, I would say so. It’s not just Red Hook, but New York more generally. I sometimes make sculptures that look like jewelry, and in the jewelry district here you can get any thickness of chain, or get something plated—almost anything I need I can find here. I can also sell my metal scraps and use the money to buy new materials; metals are convertible commodities in New York.

SHOLIS Your process is beginning to sound like managing a series of flows. Materials sometimes literally wash ashore a few blocks away. Some get made into artworks and enter another circuit, and the leftovers are eventually recycled.

BOVE It’s not all movement; there is also a lot of . . . well, marinating. I take in more than I need, and things sit around together for a while.

SHOLIS There’s another side to your work that many people discuss, an aspect that is derived in part from its references to spiritual seekers or guides.

BOVE Perhaps this ties in to what I said earlier about the ability of public artworks to engage a different part of a viewer’s consciousness, because it requires a different kind of attention. Sometimes when people hear the word “psychic” they think “flaky.” I’m interested in means of apprehension that are not necessarily anti-analytic but that are not routed through the intellect.

SHOLIS A prelinguistic understanding?

BOVE Not prelinguistic or anti-linguistic or anti-intellectual. Just nonlinguistic. Sort of like the process my work has undergone in the last few years, moving away from the inclusion of—or direct reference to—printed material. There are still cultural references, but it’s not as easy to discern a particular one.

That shift is in part because I don’t want my work to seem like a research project. One is rewarded for being visually literate and knowing about the culture that this material emerges from, but it’s not a game of figuring out how the different references relate to each other. I prefer the idea of “irresolvability.” I want my works to have a shifting identity.
SHOLIS So the new works are more vague? Though perhaps without the negative connotations associated with that word.

BOVE I want to recuperate vagueness. Sometimes I imagine myself as the first viewer, and I look for elements that cause me to think, “I don’t get that,” or, “That doesn’t do anything for me.”

SHOLIS In past interviews you’ve mentioned the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the I Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, the Kama Sutra. Plus many of the pocket paperbacks in your early work were translations of books on sociology and psychology by European authors. How conscious are you of bringing to bear upon your work an intellectual heritage that isn’t American?

BOVE It’s important, but I’m also interested in the American filter. I feel that you’ve phrased the question as if these were active choices on my part, but the intellectual culture in Berkeley when I was growing up was very international, very assimilationist. Many people living there and then were looking to other cultures for meaning. It can seem now like an impulse to get rid of everything in American culture. Every aspect of American ideology was being reevaluated, although in retrospect I can see how a lot of the dominant culture was reproduced unconsciously.

My first big sculpture show, in 2003, was called “Experiment in Total Freedom.” That was a kind of joke about the era, or at least my experience of it. Adults seemed so permissive: “You can do whatever you want!” As a child, I wondered, “What does that mean?” I feel I actually need a structure in order to do something. There is something kind of limiting about total freedom.

SHOLIS That cultural moment didn’t last long, nor does it continue in many places today. Perhaps it’s not sustainable.

BOVE I hate to generalize about the period, or about the place. I’ll simply say that cultural inquiry of the kind that went on in the Bay Area in the ’60s is a process, and it could still be very exciting. Becoming fully conscious, you know, would be a great thing. It would be great for many people today to engage with that idea.

SHOLIS I want to ask you about the legacy of Surrealism. Do you feel that the ideas about consciousness animating it ever truly broke on these shores?

BOVE In California—Berkeley, San Francisco—there’s a tradition of found-object assemblage, stuff that is almost naively inherited from Surrealists. There was a kind of beat culture, exemplified by Wallace Berman, that seems like Surrealism plus the Kabbalah, which is an interesting formulation. My early experiences with art-making were through that instantiation of Surrealism. I was attracted as a young person to Bruce Conner’s work. If Surrealism did find a home in the U.S., I feel like that’s where it went—to California.

On the other hand, I sometimes wonder whether Surrealism is too silly for us. I don’t mean that dismissively; I love Surrealism. I think there is a lot of it in American art, but people don’t want to call it that because it sounds too silly. We have an aversion to, a squeamishness about, the unseriousness of the unconscious.

SHOLIS I can tell by this long table covered with books and periodicals that you spend time sifting through all manner of visual materials. What else are you looking at lately?

BOVE Right now I’m looking at Plop Art.

SHOLIS Pop Art?

BOVE Plop Art.

SHOLIS To learn how to be a public artist?

BOVE[laughs] Not to learn how to do it—just to see what’s out there. The art world is critical of it, but I’m finding much that fascinates me. Its relative disuse gives it a lot of . . . wilderness.

SHOLIS It’s unsupervised. You can explore it at your own pace.

BOVE I like that. Do you know [George] Gurdjieff? He thought that esoteric knowledge is almost like a material—a material of which there is a finite amount. If you have certain knowledge, you can’t just give it to everyone. If you share it, you are actually parceling it out. But if no one’s paying attention, well, that’s how a sculpture that’s in plain sight could seem like it has a wilderness. For people who do want to give it attention, it can give something back. All the material hasn’t been snatched up. That’s part of what I found interesting about the New York City project.

SHOLIS Do you suspect that people will figure out that part of the work is millions of years old?

BOVE I hope so. It has a lot of . . . energy stored up in it.

SHOLIS Where did you find the petrified wood?

BOVE On the Internet, of course. I went out to Washington State to pick it up.

SHOLIS At some point you decided that it would be OK to use materials that you didn’t happen across on the Brooklyn waterfront, or you didn’t find in a used bookstore. Was that a difficult threshold to cross?

BOVE I was aware of the transition. I had set certain constraints on my activities, and I had to ask, Is there a reason for the constraint? Or does it no longer serve me?

SHOLIS What is the constraint in your studio now, if there is one? Or does your studio practice replicate the freedom and chaos of your childhood in Berkeley?

BOVE I’m sure there are a lot of constraints but maybe there are so many of them that I don’t even know how to articulate them. I started with very rigid ones. At first I was only looking at issues of Playboy published between 1967 and 1972, or something like that. That was it. I couldn’t invent anything. I could photograph them or draw from them but that was it. I started off very confined, and have gradually loosened up.

Brian Sholis is a PhD candidate in the department of history at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.

Collaborative artist book published on the occasion of Carol Bove’s exhibition, Plants and Mammals, held at the Horticutural Society of New York, 2008. Includes a poster designed by Bove, a 4″ x 5″ c-print of Bove’s sculptural contribution to the show and a fold-out, accordion-style picture book by Janine Lariviere, titled Twentieth Century Narcissus, that chronicles the narcissus cultivars, or daffodil to us laypeople, throughout the twentieth century.

“The photos of flowers in this book have been taken from the gardening catalogs that came to my house between 2002 and 2005. I composed a timeline with the photos according to each flower’s date of origin. By no means is this an exhaustive encyclopedia of the twentieth century’s daffodils. I hoped to have flowers for each year but instead found the flowers in varying concentrations throughout the century.

The daffodil bulb itself is a kind of record. It has the potential to persist indefinitely, blooming again every year. The maintenance of this living library depends on people keeping track of the flowers and choosing to grow them. Current and past tastes, breeding innovations, and the ease of growing, all contribute to determining what remains from the past to present.” – Janine Lariviere

Abandoned Futures: On Carol Bove

October 1, 2013

In September 1967, the artist Robert Smithson boarded the No. 30 bus at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan on a science-fiction journey to his hometown. In his account of the trip, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” Smithson describes a decaying post-industrial landscape where even the equipment for building a new highway looked like “pre-historic creatures trapped in the mud, or, better, extinct machines—mechanical dinosaurs stripped of their skin.” In his day, what is now called the High Line—the park built atop an old elevated railway spur on Manhattan’s West Side—was not yet such a ruin; it was entirely abandoned only in 1980. Since the first section of the High Line opened as a park in 2009, it has been as good an advertisement as any for an outlook that is surely the antithesis of Smithson’s pessimistic vision of a landscape pocked with “monumental vacancies that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an abandoned set of futures.” Such terrain has proven ideal for real estate speculation, with its memory-traces offering a decorative “distressed” context for what might otherwise seem too glossy and boringly upmarket—dull.

The High Line project is not yet finished, and if you want a taste of the spur’s ramshackle grit from the days when only intrepid trespassers found their way onto its forgotten tracks, you can book a guided walking tour of the unfinished portion, which runs above a railyard that at some point is supposed to be occupied by sixteen mixed-use skyscrapers encompassing more than 12 million square feet of space. The topic of the tour is not the High Line itself but rather “Caterpillar,” a group of seven sculptures by the Brooklyn-based artist Carol Bove (on view through May), and the latest installment in the High Line’s ongoing public art program. Three of Bove’s pieces are rectilinear assemblages built of rusted I-beams that look as much like remains from the spur’s old rail machinery—or the flayed dinosaurs of Smithson’s Passaic—as brand-new constructions. A couple of others are, by contrast, snow-white curlicues of powder-coated steel, looking like bits of giant springs that have been partially unsprung. It’s strange to see them sitting amid weeds and rubble.

Whereas the I-beam constructions seem like remains from the past, the curlicues appear to have dropped in from a spiffy future that’s still as desirable as a child’s new toy. A representation of the present, full of plans and halfway built, might be the smallest of the pieces here, Visible Things and Colors (2013). Made of concrete and grids of little brass cubes, it could be a sort of architectural model, a reflection of the obdurate plans and glittering future being fashioned for the area. But another of the works, Monel (2012), might be an admonition against such ambitions, at least if you know its backstory. Essentially a flat slab of bronze, a kind of horizontal monolith, Monel was previously shown at last year’s Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany. Not long after being returned to Bove’s studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, it was engulfed by the salty floodwaters of Hurricane Sandy, which corroded its glossy surface and introduced an unanticipated patina of decay. For Bove as for Smithson, there are always new ruins in the future; some of them we can learn to live with.

Another seven of Bove’s works are on view at the Museum of Modern Art through January 12 under the title “The Equinox.” Among them are an I-beam structure (Chesed, 2013) and one of the coiled and uncoiled powder-coated steel pieces (although its title, The White Tubular Glyph, 2012, belies the fact that one section of it is actually black); still another is very similar to Visible Things and Colors on the High Line, except that along with brass squares it uses high-density fiberboard, painted white, rather than concrete and feels correspondingly lighter. At MoMA, Bove has put the formal vocabulary of “Caterpillar” in a different context. No weeds here: the seven works are kept immaculate and untouchable on a vast white platform. Nearby, a mass of debris—wood, rusty wire and who knows what else—seems to belong to a different formal idiom altogether. Could it have been retrieved from the unkempt mess of the unrenovated portion of the High Line? Its title is Disgusting Mattress (2012). Maybe it’s another remnant of Sandy’s depredations; in any case, one more souvenir of disaster. The title of another piece at MoMA, Triguna (2012), is a reference to “the three universal qualities (gunas) of all experience in the Ayurvedic tradition: light, darkness, and change,” as the wall text notes. What’s remarkable is the understated way Bove’s art evokes all three.

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Such art might, no doubt, be a little too understated for some tastes. Disgusting Mattress looks like sculpture in the pristine setting of MoMA, but on the High Line it would be just another bit of rubbish. By contrast, the works in powder-coated steel might seem too obviously sculptural in the museum, if not in the weeds. But permeability to its context is essential to Bove’s art. “A sculpture’s unfixed identity is a basic point of entry for me,” she’s said. “An artwork can be repelling for its cheesiness and conservatism and at the same time its elegance will point to the possibility for some kind of heightened experience.” The aspect of Bove’s art that points toward the search for heightened—I might even say transcendent—experience can best be seen at a third New York exhibition of her work. It’s in the West Village at Maccarone, where Bove has a solo show with the riddling title “RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?”, and she has also curated (at a project space around the corner, with Philip Smith) an exhibition called “Qor Corporation: Lionel Ziprin, Harry Smith and the Inner Language of Laminates” (both through October 19). The difference is not so much in Bove’s sculptures themselves; they are similar to the ones at MoMA and the High Line. It’s rather in the context she’s created by placing them in juxtaposition to the work of the cult figures Ziprin and Smith—of whom more shortly.

A word like “transcendent” can set off alarms. It doesn’t sound very critical or rigorous, and it might evoke New Age claptrap. The risk of plunging into some sort of hippie-dippy self-delusion comes with the territory that Bove’s been exploring ever since her sculpture began attracting attention a decade or so ago. Especially in the beginning (and in less overt ways, still today), the matter of her work—its materials and subject matter—has often mined or evoked the 1960s, which for her was the time of “a spontaneous widespread movement to reevaluate culture and to investigate being.”

It was a period of political unrest, but above all of spiritual upheaval. Among Bove’s first works to draw notice were sculptures in the form of shelving units displaying arrays of books and objects. Typical of these is one from 2002–03 called Conversations With Jorge Luis Borges, which takes its name, as you might guess, from one of the approximately twenty paperbacks it includes—some others being George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and D.T. Suzuki’s An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. Some of the books are shelved upright, some have been placed in piles (spine out or bottom out), but two are held open to display black-and-white picture spreads: one showing African sculpture, the other what looks like an encounter-group exercise in which a scrum of people is holding someone up above their heads; the elevated person looks full of joy. Also on the shelves are a metronome and a sort of abstract object made of sticks and string, a kind of arts-and-crafts-class version of Constructivist sculpture (apparently, it illustrates the structural principle that Buckminster Fuller dubbed “tensegrity”). The selection of books is, of course, singular; it could have been the bookshelf in the home of some kid I went to school with, whose parents were much hipper and more worldly than my own. But the piece is not only about the content of the books it contains; it’s also about style and form—how the wood-and-metal shelving unit is as much a product of its time as the books, and how the square configuration of the piece as a whole recalls the back-to-basics aesthetics of the minimalist art of the 1960s.

Could such a sculpture, a Borgesian time machine, be owned by someone whose apartment is filled with books overflowing from shelves and piling up everywhere? I doubt it. Entropy would eventually erase the carefully constructed yet fragile distinction between Bove’s fastidiously arranged books and randomly accumulated new ones, and the old ones might even be read again. For Bove, that’s as it should be. Although her work teems with clever references to the history of modern art, it does not reaffirm the idea of a self-contained and autonomous history of art. Instead, it suggests that the impetus behind changes in art are part and parcel of broader cultural trends.

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Bove no longer makes pieces like Conversations With Jorge Luis Borges, but what has endured is her focus on the intellectual process by which fairly ordinary things can coalesce into a work of art and just as easily splinter apart and return to the quotidian world. As she recently told the critic Brian Sholis, “My sculptures can and must be taken apart and then put back together. Disaggregation is important. Therefore, each element needs to maintain its individual identity, its autonomy.”

Given that she seems to keep lowering the boundary between art and nonart to the point of near indiscernibility, it’s not surprising that the two shows at Maccarone left me wondering if there’s any difference between one person’s art and another’s, between an exhibition of Bove’s work and one she has curated. Although the show on Ziprin and Smith was as informative about those two fascinating and unlikely figures as one could hope—this is not one of those infuriating affairs where the curator calls more attention to herself than to her subject—in some ways it doesn’t seem that different from a Bove exhibition. One reason is that works by Smith, Ziprin, and his wife and constant collaborator Joanne Ziprin, as well as by a little-known West Coast sculptor named Richard Berger, had also crept into Bove’s show at Maccarone. Just as her art can encompass books and knickknacks by others, it can subsume their drawings, paintings and sculptures.

But I took Bove at her word and saw the show on Smith and Ziprin as just what it purports to be: a trawl through the archives meant to cast light on some of the most fascinating and mysterious characters in the American culture of the 1950s and ’60s. Smith is widely known as the compiler of the groundbreaking Anthology of American Folk Music, a collection of then–nearly forgotten music recorded between 1927 and 1932. Sourced entirely from Smith’s own collection of 78 rpm “race” and “hillbilly” records, it was released by Folkways Records as three sets of two LPs each in 1952 and jump-started the nascent folk music revival that came to a peak a decade later with artists like Bob Dylan; it was a harbinger of the re-emergence of what Greil Marcus would later call “the old, weird America.” But Smith was also a pioneering experimental filmmaker who specialized in abstract animations, influenced at first by the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, as well as a painter and graphic artist, although few of his works in these media survive. And as the child of Theosophists, Smith was an adept of the occult, “the Paracelsus of the Chelsea Hotel.”

For his friend Lionel Ziprin, coming as he did from a line of mystics and renowned rabbis, the supernatural was likewise all in the family. Ziprin thought of himself as a poet, but he seems mainly to have been a nerve center for the bohemia of the Lower East Side, at whose apartment artists, filmmakers and musicians would mingle—Bruce Conner and Jordan Belson, Thelonious Monk and Bob Dylan. Ziprin was a lifelong student of Kabbalah. His wife Joanna was a designer, model and sometime artist; clearly, it was she who had to make sure of the practicalities of life in the family, and so it was she who conceived the idea—how 1950s is this?—that they support themselves by going into the greeting-card business. Thus in 1951, with the intention “to design, perfect and market an idea in greeting cards that we believe in…having to do with imagination, bits of black magic and shoe strings,” they created a company called Ink Weed Arts. It was probably the black magic that doomed the firm, which was sold off three years later, near bankruptcy, only to be succeeded by another similar—and similarly short-lived—venture, the Haunted Inkbottle. Then, in 1958, the Ziprins came across a magical new material just developed by DuPont, called Mylar. They had the idea that decorative designs could be printed on Mylar and laminated to just about anything that could be used for any imaginable purpose. To promote the idea, the Qor Corporation was founded. As one of its veterans recalled, it was “a result of both genius, lots of marijuana, and arrogance.” It just might have worked, but Lionel Ziprin had no intention of actually manufacturing anything that would then have to be sold: “I’m not going to peddle it! I’m not going to sell it on Delancey Street!” He wanted to license his designs to big corporations and collect royalties. He found no takers.

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The Ziprins’ efforts to make it big in business have rightly been called “one of the most curious and wonderfully cracked attempts at merging Beat sensibility with American consumerism.” No wonder an artist like Bove is fascinated by them. That the seemingly most anodyne decorative motifs might nonetheless be impregnated with diagrammatic content of supposedly cosmic significance, such as the Kabbalistic Tree of Life (a favorite of Smith’s) and allusions to materials found in books with titles like An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy, sounds like a scenario from the paranoid fantasies of a Don DeLillo character. It also offers an eccentric parallel to the oft-heard demand that the barriers between art and daily life be dissolved.

Today, as the art world becomes increasingly corporatized, artists (and not only Bove) are finding impossible projects like Ziprin’s and Smith’s more appealing than ever. Where the artists go, the curators follow—and why not, since (as with Bove) the boundary between artmaking and curating has become as porous as the boundary between one person’s present and another’s past. This year’s Venice Biennale, for instance—which I haven’t had a chance to see in person—has thrown its net far beyond the official art world to find, as one observer puts it, “esoteric cosmologies…dark fantasies, enigmatic weirdness, monomaniacal tunnel vision, and much else in like vein.” It sounds like Ziprin and Smith would have fit right in, alongside such historical precursors (and merely unofficial artists) as Carl Gustav Jung, Rudolf Steiner and Roger Caillois.

Not everyone is happy about this. I’m as wary as anyone else of art being swept into some sort of Aquarian la-la land, but consider the supposedly hardheaded alternative on offer: “current artistic endeavors that define art as a social sphere of specialized forms of knowledge and dialogues that are themselves the result of historically specific linguistic and formal interventions within a highly developed system of individual and collective reading competences, incessantly shifting on a spectrum ranging from the mnemonic to the critical.” This is the art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, describing the virtues of the art he thinks was underplayed in the current Biennale. A closed “social sphere” of accredited operators is enough to drive anyone in their right mind to turn on, tune in and drop out of the bureaucratic morass, and start delving into the alternatives. Or better still, like Bove, to search out the uncharted territory where critically sanctioned artistic approaches like minimalism and Conceptualism cross paths with their disinherited Orphic doubles—or at least their memory-traces.

Carol Bove interview

New York-based sculptor Carol Bove makes work that slips effortlessly between the natural and industrial, the found and made, order and chaos. She tells us about experiencing art, bringing colour into her palette, and her love of crushing things

What do you want the viewer to experience in this show?‘In staging the works throughout the space, I want there to be surprises in the way that things unfold: how you’re always looking at one thing through another. There are particular routes suggested and choreographed around the galleries because I want people to think about being in the space. It’s intentional that one of the galleries feels as if you’re barred from entering because it’s kind of crammed with too much work. And I’m completely immersed in thinking about what a sculpture does on and off the plinth. Whatever display strategy you use as an artist will change the perception of the work.’

Why four works in each of the four galleries?
‘That wasn’t something I set out to do but it’s not a coincidence, it’s how things gelled. Four seems elemental and is a cardinal number, but it’s also symmetrical, so it gives the works an awkwardness.’

Is the exhibition designed especially for London?
‘When I started working on the show over three years ago, I thought: what does London need? It needs a forest! Then I thought you should be able to go into the forest and touch it and it will have some sort of sexuality.’

So we can touch the sculptures?
‘That’s where it gets complicated. It’s actually really okay to touch ‘Blindsight’ (2014). It’s made from petrified wood, which is confusing because it looks exactly like wood but it’s stone. There’s this cognitive dissonance to it. Also, you can’t fathom its age: it’s 30 million years old and that pulls you into a different kind of space, to think about something that prefigures humans and history. It’s like a witness in the gallery space.’

But you’ve bolted an I-beam to it!
‘Yeah, I love I-beams. There is something very elegant and awkward about them.’

The works vary from raw to slick textures. Is variety important to you?
‘I want to have a variety of different feeling tones, that’s part of the use of materials. Rusty metal, for example, is really substantial, which is partly about romance and violence. Sometimes, though, it’s totally a slick finish fetish.’

In previous shows you’ve referred to or worked with other creative figures. Why go it alone here?
‘This is an unusual exhibition for me because there’s no other artist or author in it. One of the shaping principals in making this show was not to have any other direct reference points. It partly addresses referentiality in art, which is a habit of our time. When we look at artworks, we have a tendency to see the constitute elements, do a DNA analysis, and say: “It’s part Brancusi and Jeff Koons”. There is a reductionism that happens with that, whereas I’m trying to make things that suggest a different type of viewing that solicits certain types of referential readings, but then frustrates them so they never sit comfortably and get resolved.’

Some of the steel works are colourful. Is that a new development?
‘I wanted to have colour in the show. Sometimes everything is so brown and tasteful, and I wanted something that is tacky and harsher. They also look like what they are, but in a way they don’t. I think they look very spontaneous, soft, and as if they’ve been made in an easy way, which is true. But they’re not soft, they’re pretty thick steel. I have a hydraulic press in the studio that you can just put them into and crank on it to manipulate the form.’

That sounds satisfying.
‘At a certain point last year I thought I wanna start crushing things. Crushing things is really fun!’

==

Critic’s Guide – 04 Apr 2009

Carol Bove

In an ongoing series, frieze asks an artist, curator or writer to list the books that have influenced them

Olof AlexanderssonLiving Water: Viktor Schauberger and the Secrets of Natural Energy (1990)Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) was an inventor, self-taught scientist and fifth-generation forest warden. Through his careful observation of the Austrian wilderness he discovered living qualities in water, ‘the earth’s blood’, and developed technologies using nature’s creative principles. Schauberger started issuing serious warnings of an impending ecological crisis in the 1920s.

I’m not sure if I appreciate this more for its ideas or its tonal qualities. Jameson’s writing is as classical and animate as a photograph by Irving Penn. Some of the more complex sentences require me to stop and ponder for several repetitions, but they also strike me as playful, decorative flourishes.

The Bhagavad Gita (1985)

The manual of practical and spiritual wisdom I keep in my handbag. I didn’t ‘get’ other translations of the book – Easwaran’s commentary is incredibly helpful for a modern, western reader.

Anna BalakianSurrealism: The Road to the Absolute (1970)

I have the growing urge to consider the persistent and largely unacknowledged influence of surrealism since the 1920s and I find it in all sorts of unlikely places. It is the shadow of modernism.

The I Ching or Book of Changes (1950)

This oracle describes every possible situation in the world, reveals them as they emerge and describes how they will develop over time. Jung’s introduction is a link between the ancient book and a modern audience because he asks us to understand its wisdom through The Unconscious. True, the oracle presumes a very foreign political, technological and domestic reality from our own, so in obtaining advice one must apply very creative allegorical readings. Still it was a vibrant instrument from 1950 through the mid 1970s. Its importance as a catalyst for art in the 20th century cannot be calculated.

This completes a suite with the I Ching and Balakian’s Surrealism. I think of the I Ching as a non-living intelligence that sits in the middle of the 20th century: surrealism goes in on one side and is reconfigured by a non-western set of ‘chance operations’. What comes out is a wide array of interconnected artistic practices that all involve Tony Conrad.

American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist(1996)

This peerless individual requires more attention!

Wendy Goodman and Hutton WilkinsonTony Duquette (2007)

‘Decorating is not a surface performance, it’s a spiritual impulse, inborn and primordial.’ I imagine the series of objects and settings depicted as a gloss on a parallel art historical narrative. The fantasy that Duquette (1914–99) created is so complete I didn’t notice the whole thing is junk assemblage until I got to pictures from the 1970s. Among many other things, a necklace for the Duchess of Windsor, a playhouse for Liza Minnelli, a portrait of the designer’s beautiful wife by Man Ray and numerous tabletop arrangements called ‘games of chance.’

Herbert MuschampThe Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle (2006)

Desultory, anecdotal and quippy yet epic and authoritative, Muschamp demonstrates how the emergence of gay taste culture in the 1960s corrected modernism’s narrow-minded rigidity, among other things. A forceful case for the importance of audience.

Avant Garde magazine, number 8(1969)

Avant Garde magazine was aligned with the magical-grotesque-naked-psychedelic axis of avant-gardism but its presentation was dynamic and clear, reflecting the partnership of its scandal-attracting editor, Ralph Ginzburg, and its designer, Herb Lubalin. I used to think that number 8, dedicated to the late erotic engravings of Pablo Picasso, was a total waste of an issue but now it’s my favourite one. The nearly square-format pages of uncoated paper are a mix of strong and off colours: black, magenta, process yellow, red, lavender, mineral green, olive, nut brown and buff. The designer took outrageous liberties with the engravings, printing them in contrasting colours, reversals, and multiple scales to produce an exquisite complement to Picasso’s images.

Jay DeFeo and The Rose (2003)

An entire book dedicated to DeFeo’s massive painting, The Rose (1958–66), is good reminder about patience.

Carol Bove’s “RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?” and “Qor Corporation: Lionel Ziprin, Harry Smith and the Inner Language of Laminates”

Riddle me this: Just what is it that continues to make Carol Bove’s focused yet multifaceted sculptural practice so uniquely satisfying?

A simple answer might start with her materials—a carefully calibrated mix of concrete cubes and I-beams, petrified wood and peacock feathers, geometric figures fashioned in delicate brass and powder-coated steel, and well-thumbed paperback books and other esoteric ephemera. These items come together in shelf works, sculptural assemblages, and exhibition tableaux that read equally as modern and ancient, industrial and organic, utopian and brutal, hopeful and melancholic. Then there is the mythology of their origin to consider—either in Bove’s Northern California upbringing or her current life within the post-industrial wilderness of South Brooklyn, where materials like driftwood and desiccated mattresses literally wash up at her feet. (Both of which are part of the artist’s exhibition “The Equinox,” which is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until January 12, 2014.) But there is also something else at work. A productive vagueness animates all of Bove’s work from the last decade or so, meandering between familiarity and enigma while engaging the viewer’s attention at both conscious and subconscious levels.

Those two registers of understanding—the analytic and the intuitive—are pushed toward one another in the pair of exhibitions Bove now has on view at Maccarone. The first is a presentation of the artist’s recent sculptures interspersed with a handful of works by other artists, including Richard Berger’s 1976 sculptural recreation of his Chesterfield sofa made up entirely of lead droplets suspended in mid-air by different lengths of monofilament, a small painting by the versatile Harry Smith, and a vitrine of unattributed visionary drawings from the Lionel Ziprin archive. The exhibition has the puzzling title: “RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?” And, indeed, why is an orange like a bell? As it turns out, this is the question the Riddler poses in the very first episode of the original Batman television series; and it is Robin who ultimately provides the homophonic answer: “because they both must be peeled/pealed.”

In approaching Bove’s sculptures, one can either choose to play the game of peeling back the layers of cultural and formal references to their juicy interiors, or simply let the arcane allusions resonate on their own, filling the space with meditative power. There is no single correct answer, and there are rewards in both methods of engagement. Peel’s foe, not a set animal, laminates a tone of sleep (2013) is a thick pillar of concrete, its top half interrupted by a crystalline lattice of stacked brass cubes that alternately seem to dissolve away or explode into a beautiful, but almost cancerous bloom. The name of the sculpture, meanwhile, offers a bounty of clues in exchange for some casual research. While it plays off the answer to the riddle of the orange and the bell, the work’s title most likely comes from the bizarre, palindromic lyrics on John Greaves and Peter Blegvad’s obscure 1976 concept album Kew. Rhone. In the lyrics and in Bove’s sculpture, “Peel’s Foe” could refer to the fossilized mastodon skeleton excavated in 1801 in New York’s Hudson Valley by Charles Wilson Peale, founder of the first American museum of art and natural history. The imagined (and admittedly anthropomorphic) indignation of Peale’s mastodon at being awoken from slumber in order to serve as a mere set piece points to a possible antagonism within museum culture between the object and its method of display. But it also focuses attention on the nearby Untitled (2013), an awe-inspiring chunk of prehistoric petrified wood affixed like a torso or a totem to an upright steel beam. The massive specimen—reading more like a femur than the trunk of a tree—is a reminder of the pure, almost alchemical transformation that wood undergoes during petrification—when minerals slowly replace organic matter, and only a perfect stone remains.

Elsewhere in the gallery, two sculptures made out of white enameled steel—Solar Feminine and Hieroglyph (both 2013)—counter this metaphysical brew. Like oversized corkscrews, their spiraling forms have been a feature of Bove’s work since her conception of several outdoor commissions, first for Documenta 13 in 2012, and currently for the as-yet-undeveloped Rail Yards section of the High Line in New York. Built from rule-based configurations of half circles and short, straight lines, the sculptures’ forms are elegant (the artist refers to them as “glyphs”), yet also slightly awkward—tendering a human touch to the otherwise limited formulae found in most of the public art one encounters in plazas and parks worldwide. The relational nature of public art also surfaces in the updated display of Flora’s Garden II (2012–13), another sculpture made from I-beams, concrete, and brass boxes that appear to self-replicate. Attacked by vandals while on view in Kassel last year, the bent and broken brass pieces of the work are now laid out on an adjacent platform like Sol LeWitt’s Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974).

The second exhibition, which is curated by Bove and the Bay Area rare book dealer Philip Smith, is a straightforward presentation of selections from the archive of Lionel Ziprin—an under-recognized, but hugely influential artistic figure of the New York postwar years—and his Qor Corporation. Ziprin was a prolific poet, bohemian businessman, student of the Kabbalah, and friend to countless artists and musicians. Together with his wife Joanne (herself a brilliantly oddball graphic artist), he led an enclave of like-minded spiritual seekers and creative nonconformists from his apartment-based salon on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Among the Ziprins’ closest cohorts was the artist Harry Smith, who was by then already well-known for his inventive animated films, not to mention his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, a multi-volume compilation of folk, blues, and country music. Smith was also instrumental within the Qor Corporation, a start-up company that operated from 1958 to 1962 and developed processes for making intricate, reverse-printed designs on Mylar laminates. “Qor Corporation: Lionel Ziprin, Harry Smith and the Inner Language of Laminates” focuses on Smith’s contributions to the enterprise, including his colorful mock-ups for decorated tiles and dozens of drawings and collaborative doodles of the kabbalistic “Tree of Life”—a symbolic, geometric diagram used to describe the flow of creative energy from a Divine Source to its distillation in the material world.

The “Tree of Life” may, in fact, lie at the heart of both of these exhibitions. As a map of the creation of the universe in its macrocosmic form, the symbol’s symmetries and patterns become a source for harmonic compositions on a microcosmic scale—including works of art. There is something undeniably Edenic, whether intentional or not, in Bove’s repeated use of the sculpture garden as a motif and muse for her work. She may have indeed tapped into the energy of a kind of universal abstraction by exploring this prelapsarian state, one that satiates a hunger that generally goes unnoticed until it is by chance fulfilled.

Ginny Kollak is a curator, writer, and editor living in upstate New York.

1View of “Carol Bove: RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?” Maccarone, New York, 2013.

2View of “Carol Bove: RA, or Why is an orange like a bell?” Maccarone, New York, 2013.

In Carol Bove’s studio, there are many rooms. From the windows of the first, one can look out onto the street: garages; asphalt lots; roofs of other buildings much like this one. There is little to draw focus but the Red Hook waterfront is nearby, and many stories about the artist begin with the piece of driftwood or sea foam she picked up on her way here. The natural material comes later though. This first room is the book room.

Piled from edge to edge on a large, rectangular table at the room’s center are Bove’s books: mimeographed poetry magazines, copies of In Orbit by Wright Morris (“In the space of one day, Jubal E. Gainer, high school dropout and draft dodger, manages to rack up an impressive array of crimes…”), C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength and A Power Set Apart by Joseph McHugh, given to Bove by her friend’s father. There are issues of VIEW magazine, the 1940s publication by artist Charles Henri Ford and critic Parker Tyler, one of which contains a black and white collage by Marcel Duchamp.

Bove does not like books that are especially valuable. Many on the table have been selected for her, or at least brought to her attention, by her friend Phillip, a book dealer. “He had never heard of Sol LeWitt,” she tells me, and it is clear that this is a good thing. Phillip’s interest is in poetry and literature. He knows Vito Acconci instead.

“We live with information in a different way from fifteen years ago,” says Bove. “It has become increasingly important to devise a system to place limits on what types and how much information we consume. But it’s a puzzle to design a semi-permeable membrane that allows a variety of different types of information in and isn’t completely predetermined by one’s current expectations. It should allow surprises to enter.”

Books have a place in Bove’s sculptures as both reference and component. She groups them in twos and threes with spines facing out and props them open to image centerfolds on mid-century modern wooden shelves beside other found objects like metronomes or peacock feathers. One such work, The Dyadic Cyclone (2006), is titled after a 1976 book of the same name by neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, philosopher and inventor of the isolation tank, John Cunningham Lilly, and his wife, Antonietta. The book is autobiographical and explores the Lillys’ concern with merging centers — their own, figuratively, and those of two counter-spinning cyclones.

Bove’s Cyclone is a three-tiered shelf bearing several stacked books with one propped open to a double-page picture, taken from the ground beneath two stone high-rise buildings. Pinned to the wall above the shelves is an image of a sphere containing forms in a state of merging. A piece of driftwood on the uppermost shelf sits touching a stack of three books, liberated from the sea but still belonging to the depths — similar in essence to Lilly’s inquiries, which never quite belonged to the conscious mind.

“With artists and authors, I don’t want to colonize their work,” Bove says. “I want to present their work as autonomous statements which remain completely intact. I’m mostly working on the framing and display of things. Of course, by suggesting a context and a possible vector of approach I’m interfering with their meaning and reception so I also want to acknowledge the existence of forced collaboration with these artists.”

“I also want to make space for the viewer. I’m not sure if I can explain it. It has something to do with making things that are extremely obvious — so obvious that I feel that they existed before. When I make something that seems like the articulation of the obvious I feel like I’ve come the closest to making something that doesn’t have anything to do with my individual personality.”

Much has been made of Bove’s interest in the late 60s and early 70s, although “interest” is an understatement: her research into the period is intrepid and ongoing. It has informed much of her work in some way since she graduated from New York University in the late 90s. Bove’s shelf installations challenge a linear hierarchy of meaning: the books and objects are not of this moment but they are still here, being witnessed, and thus have present energy. At the same time, Bove avoids, even criticizes, deification of objects as mascots of history. She questions their status as artifacts, insofar as “artifact” suggests that an object’s truest meaning has expired.

It takes a particular grace to deal with subject matter so recent and yet somehow so overexposed. In Below Your Mind (2004), published in conjunction with Bove’s first international solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Gregory Williams calls Bove’s research an “excavation” — and it is precisely this. Bove invokes insights and ideas from the 60s and 70s that are assumed to have lapsed or lost traction, revealing them as the basis for much of what we claim as “modern.” Her approach is consistent, regardless of whether an idea or action has come to be thought of as wrong or right, a success or a failure.

“I think it’s an inherently interesting time but my continuing interest is probably a result of my own biography, which begins there [in 1971],” says Bove. “The work I made in school was not really related to the work I am making now but… it has had continuity. When I got out of school, thirty years had passed since the late 60s. My belief is that thirty years constitutes a full fashion-cycle. Thirty-year-old stuff looks great and vibrates with relevance and so there was that irresistible draw. Twelve years later, I continue to think of 1969/70 as the aperture where I can enter history but I allow myself much more freedom to move around.”

Where perhaps the first room in Bove’s studio is in service of accumulation — of information, of objects — the second is for distillation. On a tall set of industrial shelves toward the back of the room, dozens of elaborate shells are arranged in an unknowable order. They are from the Philippines and were given to Bove en masse. Their forms are perfect and they have retained their pink, which would not be exceptional but for the fact that these shells are from the 1940s. To one side, lesser specimens are heaped in a wheelbarrow.

Bove approaches nature with a “conservator’s ethic.” When elements from the natural world are utilized in a work, nothing is glued in a way where it cannot be unglued. It is important to Bove that an object appropriated from nature has the right to reassert its autonomy once a sculpture is disassembled. “When the sculpture is not on display the elements are removed,” she says. “Its energetic state is more relaxed when it is off duty. The sculpture is performing with the greatest tension and effort when it is being publicly exhibited.”

The steel structure that elevates the organic matter in Bove’s shell sculptures, for example, elevates each shell as a star if only for a short time. The steel affords potential and the idea of movement, belying its true function — to hold the shells temporarily in place. It is as though, once off-duty as subjects in Bove’s work, the shells have someplace else to be.

One such steel and shell configuration exists in The Foamy Saliva of a Horse, Bove’s installation for the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Components appeared on a large plinth that spanned the room, somewhere between actors in the wings and models in a presentation, awaiting reception. The plinth also held a flat net hung from a beam and rendered cylindrical by optical illusion; a piece of driftwood suspended from a rectangular brass frame; an outsized piece of rusted metal scrunched like a rejected draft and a log with fixtures attached, stood on its end.

“I’ve been using natural materials in the same way as authored human-made objects since 2005 with increasing regularity,” Bove says. “I think the nature in my work is always nature being observed by a cultured human subject. On the other hand, when we look at art we think what we’re doing is discerning and reading but maybe all of the mental processing to the side of intellect takes up the greater portion of the activity. And it remains unacknowledged, since that part of our experience can’t speak for itself.”

“I’ve been trying to find ways of frustrating ‘the reader’, i.e. the part of the viewer that interprets artworks, while at the same time encouraging reading in an effort to reach a kind of suspended thinking where binaries dissolve, and mutually exclusive positions coexist. I’ve also been thinking about the types of art experience that seem consciously uninteresting or even disgusting that are actually satisfying unconscious needs.”

At the time of my visit, Bove was completing her contribution to Documenta 13, the 100-day art festival that happens every five years in Kassel, Germany. She made four works, collectively titled Flora’s Garden: a large white tubular “glyph,” a low-lying bronze platform, a sculpture consisting of many prefinished brass hexahedrons screwed together to form an asymmetric matrix and a plinth with a piece of petrified wood attached. These pieces are still on exhibition in the gardens of the Orangerie, a former conservatory. The spatial logic of the garden, which is 300 feet long and 30 feet wide, necessitates what Bove terms “a linear encounter” with the work.

Bove has often observed the level of indifference shown to rusted wire or stray organic matter while collecting such material at the waterfront. It is similar, she says, to the level of indifference directed at “generic outdoor sculpture.” The piece of petrified wood in Flora’s Garden is a manifestation of this visible/invisible paradox: it is the perfect cast of a log, the nearest one could get to a piece of “invisible wood,” as Bove describes it: “it’s closer to an image or solid illusion than what it actually is, but it is an illusion making no effort to be an illusion.”

At the end of the hall is one last room. It is the closest thing Bove’s studio has to a control room; it contains Bove’s office, her assistant’s desk and many files. Each work of Bove’s that can be deconstructed, and will therefore necessitate reconstruction, comes with a manual. These manuals are several pages long with instructions and pictures detailing every step of the assembly process. Bove recalls the time when a shelf work was photographed for a catalogue in Germany with a book opened to the wrong page. “The placement is not arbitrary,” she says. “It’s not just ‘ish.’”

“Since people are looking at artwork on the Internet, most people who know my work know it from reproduction,” she says. “The official photo [of a work] takes one moment from its life and confers on it a special status. The official photo makes the assemblages appear to be stable objects, which is not how I think about them. I want to counteract the stabilizing tendency of repeat exposure to these images; the manuals do that.”

“In official photos, the assemblages are reduced to two dimensions and from this one point of view they ‘work’ compositionally. The more successful the documentary images are as photos the more distracting they are, that is, the more they obscure the shifting quality of the three-dimensional sculpture. In real life there are many positions from which the sculptures don’t work. Encountering them in real life you have to search for views. As you move around the sculpture, they keep coming together and falling apart.”

The manuals are made using the default settings of Microsoft Word. They are aesthetically un-arresting, save for the presence of a hand — often Bove’s own hand — that holds parts of a work aloft for pictures. The hand harks back to children’s craft books or instructive art textbooks from the 1970s. The hand proves the sculpture’s dimensionality and immediacy; the work can be held and moved, just like other “normal stuff,” according to Bove.

“The fact of the manual points to the need to take the sculpture apart and reassemble it,” she says. “It also suggests that the sculpture is not attached to one particular form or to one particular moment. Someday, the manuals will develop the air of mystery from an irretrievable time but for now they have none; they are as familiar and unglamorous as .pdf attachments. As a result, the objects they depict are closer to us, in this world and not the romantic world of photography that you can’t have or touch.”

“I think of the sculptures as tactile more than visual. You learn about them through your eyes, but when you see them you think about what it would be like to touch them. The visual aspect provides important clues about how they feel and what they are. The surface of a thing is not simply the most superficial aspect; it proceeds from its interior. The textures have their own intelligences and histories.

This building, like most in Red Hook, is old. Someone occupied it before Bove was making art, even before Bove was born. In the studio’s last room, there is a walk-in safe full of belongings left by a previous tenant over 30 years ago. There are papers and boxes and personal effects, including a fur coat. Bove has not removed these possessions nor has she investigated them especially thoroughly. Somehow, this completes a picture of Bove’s incredible restraint — of her innate understanding of what belongs to when, and which belongs to whom, and at what moments it is necessary to play with these attributions.

“You asked me to tell you about the people I encountered in my research. I can’t remember what I already told you. I spoke with a lot of botanical librarians, also people who worked within the institutions that maintain the records of naming, and some hybridizers and growers, too. Did I tell you about the librarian who had a fresh flower in her gray hair held in place by a paper clip? I doubt I’m conveying to you how magic this all seems to me — that people create flowers and organize them and keep track of their history, their part in civilization.”

This is Janine Lariviere, artist, writing to Bove in a letter titled ‘Garden Flowers’ and dated ‘Spring 2003’. The correspondence is reprinted in Below Your Mind. Pay attention to a single sentence in this text: “I doubt I’m conveying to you how magic this all seems to me.” Consider what it means to discover, and what it means to share. Consider what it means to act with intention, to look at what many have laid eyes on and see something untapped. It is the work of an explorer; a maker; a guardian. It is the work of Carol Bove.

An Interview with Workspace artist Carol BoveWorkspace is an initiative at the Blanton Museum of Art that showcases experimental work by innovative contemporary artists. Currently on view through October 1 at Workspace is New York-based artist Carol Bove’s “setting” for A. Pomodoro, curated by Kelly Baum, the Blanton’s Assistant Curator of American and Contemporary Art. As the title of Bove’s exhibition alludes, the work of Italian artist Arnaldo Pomodoro (b. 1926) figures prominently in the installation. Pomodoro’s sculpture from 1963 is featured in one of two “settings” or “sculpture gardens” created by Bove that narrate moments in the history of twentieth-century art though materials and objects that function as cues. Though not a particularly well-known artist, Pomodoro was active in Italy and California during the sixties and seventies. While he traveled in circles with the Beat poets, Lucio Fontana and Louise Nevelson, his work doesn’t belong to any specific movement or school. Pomodoro complicates a conventional, canonical understanding of art history and, as such, is in keeping with Bove’s own approach, described by Baum as “very personal and idiosyncratic.” Minutes after installing

“setting” for A. Pomodoro, Carol Bove and Kelly Baum met with …might be good’s interviewer Laura Lindenberger to discuss the work, its relationship to histories of the twentieth century and how peacock feathers entered the mix.…might be good: Could we begin by discussing the works themselves – I’d like to have you talk me through them and how they work for you in this space.Carol Bove: I always feel more satisfied if the piece is being imperiled in a way. It activates [the works] to me – there’s a feather here moving a little bit, or this piece looks like it’s almost about to fall off the edge here. It could almost break. To me, that you can have a sense of pathos for something inanimate is really exciting. … At a certain point I realized I wanted you to be able to enter the piece psychologically and I felt like making the shelf at eye level and putting objects in a tableau invited you to enter it psychologically. When I first put the objects on the plane, I thought, these are sort of temporary placeholders for the real thing I was actually going to put there later, which included a whole bunch of other things. I did it sort of unconsciously and then once everything was on there, it didn’t require so much. … I think about the whole piece as being a chronometer, where this plane is a representation of the twentieth century and the continuity of forms from the historical avant-garde moment to more of a neo-avant garde, going from pre-World War I to post-World War II and into the mid-1970s. There are forms that have a life that spans that whole time and it’s not discontinuous. This plane (referring to hanging bronze rods. On March 2, 2006, at 9 p.m., the rods suspended over the “sculpture garden” aligned perfectly with the stars congregating over the ceiling of the Berlin gallery where the work was being exhibited) is happening in the vertical, it’s built in advance of a celestial situation that’s going to come into alignment with the place and the time of the sculpture, so it’s totally contemporary, totally determined by when the exhibition is and where the exhibition is and our time now. But there’s such a built in obsolescence to that too, which makes it pointedly not work after the alignment. Or if it has some relationship to site-specificity, it’s documentary.

…mbg: In the pieces I’ve seen, you have a lot of books lined on shelves and in different configurations. I was interested in how the books become very tactile objects and whether the content of the books plays into the viewer’s experience of the piece. There are no books here, but I think this work plays on some of the same kind of questions because there’s a real tactility to the objects. They’re very sensual and personal. Could we talk a little bit about touch, how you see your viewer interacting with it, and how you interact with the individual elements within the work?

CB: The books I’ve used have been around for a long time, so you have a sense of this life that they bring to the piece that has nothing to do with my authoring it. They have their own life. And they have also relationships to the viewers; a lot of people within an installation would know of a book and would say, ‘Oh, I had that when I was 16’ or ‘That makes me think of my friend who had it.’ … I like using mass-produced books, which are no longer in circulation because they have that quality of having been circulated and having entered the popular consciousness. With this, it’s different because a lot of the patination is really artificial. I would never do that to a book, like scratch it or put it in the oven to look old; I think I prefer things that have their own life and my authoring them seems a little bit withheld. As for the specific materials, I don’t know how people would interact with them. These pieces are really new. Different materials have a lot of content and for me, the concrete cubes were something I started making for sort of a different project. And I thought that scale was exciting and that a lot of the stuff I had been doing is architectural, but more humanized.

…mbg: When everything is taken out of this space, it feels so institutional and you’ve managed to humanize it. I’ve read that many of your spaces become very domestic. It’s interesting to see how you’re transforming the space into something more intimate and personal.

CB: But it’s totally not domestic. I was thinking about the feelings I associate with the university art museum, which are kind of heavy and a little gloomy. Which I don’t mean in a bad way at all. … For me, it’s a really early art experience—that was one of the first art spaces I would go to was the university art museum at Berkeley and it was a really brutalist, concrete building. I just thought, it was such a cheat that that was the kind of architecture you got in the 1970s. My idea of the present and progress and modernism as a little kid was like, in the old days you got something where they actually tried and there was ornament and this is just so ugly. Now that kind of stuff has really grown on me and I really love that building. I wonder if that’s nostalgia or sophistication. I can’t really separate those two things. [The work is made of] really sensual material and it makes me think about that kind of architecture and minimalism but also prison and paving over the world and the kind of violence of modernity. But then also, the scale [of the work] makes it funny.

…mbg: Hearing you talk about this post-war moment or minimalist moment and your own experiences of the museum as a child—what I find really interesting is how these things collapse and how you work as both a collector and an artist. I wonder if you think of yourself as a collector, as an anthropologist of sorts, as an artist/historian?

CB: Basically not. I don’t see myself as a collector because I don’t collect. I accumulate, but then I disperse. I’m engaged with history, but I don’t think of myself that way. It’s not that I’m not disciplined, but the way that I approach it is really different from art historical discipline.

…mbg: It seems more personal, through experience.

CB: It’s really trusting if I just sort of follow my interests and intuition, then I’ll come up with connections that I wouldn’t if I approached it more rationally or more linearly. Sometimes something appears to me that seems so totally irrelevant and I think I’ll follow that, and it prevents me from anticipating what I might find.

…mbg: The Pomodoro sphere is really a beautiful addition to the installation.

CB: I wanted to put the Pomodoro in the middle of the room. It’s like an eye. Kelly was saying something that I didn’t know, which is that he worked after World War II doing rebuilding in Italy. She was comparing his world being destroyed and recreated at the same time, which has something to do with participating in World War II and then being active in the reconstruction. … I think about the different elements—they’re not specific references to anything, but they remind me of things. Like that reminds me of a Giacometti piece and that reminds me of Anne Truitt and this leaning thing is John McCracken a little bit. John McCracken was one of the first people’s work I saw and, you know when you’re a kid and you’re like, ‘I understand that’s supposed to be art, but it’s so simple.’ That really stuck in my head. … With both of these pieces, I feel like there’s a continuity of forms, both of Constructivism over the twentieth century and of Surrealism. The tonal qualities and the feelings of Surrealism are in the lighting. And the forms themselves are more related to Constructivism.

Kelly Baum: When you were describing the peacock feathers, it was so rich and the objects were so saturated with meaning for you and it kind of epitomized the way materials and objects work for you in general—they’re so multifaceted and the stories are like mythology.

CB: You’re right—

KB: It’s like one idea suggests another.

CB: I would never want to have something just be equivalent, like a one to one relationship. It’s always going to be rambling or dispersed. The peacock feathers—I feel like they have all these different points in history where they have a certain moment of interest and I think about classical mythology—they’re the eye of Hera. In the Metamorphosis there’s this beautiful story about Io and Jove. Well it’s a long story, you should read it… In Symbolism, late-nineteenth century, there’s this re-interest in peacock feathers, and in Surrealism they have this understanding of the eye quality. And then in 1966 there’s a big exhibition of Aubrey Beardsley’s work in London and there’s sort of a fashion for him and he’s crazy for peacock feathers, and there’s a revival of the 1890s stuff in the 1960s. But still, in the ‘60s, there’s a survival of the Surrealist forms and then at the same time, in men’s fashion there’s the peacock revolution; men’s fashion got exciting all of a sudden in 1966 and they called it the peacock revolution. Suddenly the males are more interesting than the females. It was widely in the popular vocabulary, the peacock revolution. But then, personally, my grandmother really loved green and blue and she loved peacock feathers. Her whole fashion sense and her sense of culture was really related to classicism and classical culture, but then she was always striving to be modern. But she was so backwards-looking that she was never engaged in a legitimate avant-garde—but she was always striving. And peacock feathers were always arranged in her house in a way for me that was emblematic her forwards/backwards sense of culture. She died recently and so after she died, I became very attracted to peacock feathers.

KB: I have a question about the driftwood—do they have an art historical reference?

CB: I made seats—that was the first part of this project, the seats. It’s hard for me to say what they are exactly. They feel very modern, they also feel very modernist and they also seem like someone specifically and then they also kind of feel like an abandoned pier—the whole thing feels like an abandoned pier to me.

KB: They seem to have lived—all their experiences are recorded. You like materials that have a story and these definitely do.

CB: Making things out of driftwood has this really nice quality because you wonder where it’s been. It could have come from Guam, or maybe from Queens, how long has it been in the water? I live near the water, so I’ll go down pretty much every day and I’ll check out what’s new –

…mbg: Is that where you found these?

CB: Yeah. I’ll have a collection and one piece will be the one that kind of inspires the intervention. I’ll have to think about that—I wonder what they are specifically. I think they’re a little bit of Mark di Suvero. … Arte povera, Pop art, but then also kind of materialist use of found materials too.

KB: The twentieth century is encapsulated in this gallery

CB: Like a kind of gloss on the twentieth century, but a very personal one.

Coconuts at Art PalaceOn view through August 23, 2006

===

An Interview with Carol Bove

Metropolis M Magazine December 2011 / January 2012

CAROL BOVE ON EXHIBITING

Erik Wysocan: I thought I would start with a very brief story about a drunken man who helped to change

my understanding of your work. At the Whitney Biennial in 2008, you had installed

Like this:

Listening to Thomas Hirschhorn talk about art, it’s hard to resist the sensation that all other artists have got it wrong. Not that he’s critical of their work — in fact, I’ve never heard him mention another living artist by name. It’s more a matter of getting caught up in his enthusiasm. Thomas Hirschhorn is a fanatic. His ardor for the thinkers after whom he names many of his works — Ingeborg Bachmann Kiosk, Deleuze Monument, Bataille Monument, and, most recently, 24h Foucault — is evident not only in these works’ devotion to their subjects’ writings but also in the sheer volume of material deployed toward this end.

Viewers must be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by the amount of verbiage in Hirschhorn’s displays. How can they be expected to absorb all of it? How can they be expected to absorb ANY of it?

The answer is that they’re not. Whenever he’s given the chance, Hirschhorn reiterates that his works are not about education or the betterment of the viewer (“I am not a social worker”). Nonetheless, specialists in the fields of philosophy and museum education are, not surpsingly, unimpressed by what they see as his forays into their departments. By their standards, his artworks are failed attempts at didacticism. And what’s more, those works don’t show their lofty subjects the respect they are due.

Herein lies the crucial distinction in Hirschhorn’s work: namely, the distinction between fanaticism and fundamentalism. As Terry Eagleton wrote recently, “Fundamentalism is a textual affair. It is an attempt to render our discourse valid by backing it with the gold standard of the Word of Words.” In his ardor for the writing of Spinoza and Bataille, he reproduces their words in staggering quanitity, stacking them in towers of photocopied sheets or using them to wallpaper entire sections of a gallery. Moreover, he mixes them with the debris of everyday modern life: discarded beverage containers, fake washing machines, shop window mannequins. He has, in other words, dragged these writings out from their “gold standard” vault and mixed them with the dross of material reality in the most irreverant manner imaginable.

For Hirschhorn, telling someone HOW to adore is every bit as wrong as telling them WHOM to adore. Hirschhorn is hardly bothered if institutions don’t approve of the direction his mania takes him. What matters is the adoration he feels for his subjects.

Craig Garrett: Every one of your exhibitions is an accretion of excess: an excess of materials, of concepts, of voices and points of view — almost like a battle or a shouting match. Looking at your works, it’s funny to think that you came to art via graphic design, a field based on the clear expression of ideas.

Thomas Hirschhorn: But I do want to be precise, and I want to clearly express my ideas! With my work I try to be absolutely clear and absolutely precise. I want to take absolute decisions and I want to work out the absolute truth. Truth is excess, and I want to work in strictness and be overwhelmed. Art is affirmation in excess, and I must risk transgression to give form to this excess. I have to be excessive and precise at the same time. I want to assert form and I want to give form. That I want to give form does not mean that I want to make forms. I want to answer the question: what is my position? I want to do it with and through my work.

CG: Your work quotes the vernacular aesthetic of protest marchers’ placards, beggars’ signs, and temporary memorials. What draws you to this visual language?

TH: I love the power of forms made in urgency and necessity. These forms have an explosive density. They are untameable and rebellious. These forms are very far from “over-design” and “over-architecture” everywhere! The legitimacy of these forms comes from commitment, from determination, from the heart. These forms do not want to impress by overeducating aesthetics or by mainstream aesthetical concerns, and these forms are not subject to changes of lifestyle. These forms have nothing to do with fashion.

CG: That’s interesting, because you live in a city of fashion — Paris. More than any other city, it represents the extreme cultivation of quality, luxury, and style. Yet it is also a city full of people who have come not for luxury or style but for life’s most basic needs: work, freedom, security. How has your relationship to these two faces of Paris changed over the years?

TH: I’ve been living in Paris for more than twenty years now. I came to Paris for work, as you said. I did not come to Paris for quality of life, for calm, for luxury, or for style. I did not come to Paris for culture, and I did not come to be an artist. But this city gave me time, anonymity, measure, encounters to develop my work. Here in Paris, in isolation, I understood how important at was to me. This is why, as an artist now, I can stay in Paris. Paris is a very big city, a metropole among others, so it is a good place to work. And I love the ordinary everyday life in Paris.

CG: Could you explain your 24h Foucault project, which will be shown at the Palais de Tokyo for Paris’s all-night art festival, La Nuit Blanche? If I’m not mistaken, it will be your most temporary work so far but also one of the most ambitious, in terms of scale and materials.

TH: 24h Foucault is an artwork made to celebrate the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who died twenty years ago. It is a homage made without respect but with love and with ambition. I share with Marcus Steinweg the idea that philosophy is art. So 24h Foucault is the affirmation that philosophy is art and that there is friendship between philosophy and art.

24h Foucault is an artwork with different elements: a twenty-four hour auditorium, a library and documentation center, the Peter Gente archive, an audio and video library, an exhibition, a shop, and a bar with a newspaper publication. 24h Foucault wants to be a battery charged with beauty, complexity, and thinking. I want to connect my brain with this Foucault battery. I want the public to be inside a twenty-four hour brain in action. 24h Foucault wants to produce urgency, listening, confrontation, reflection, resistance, and friendship. 24h Foucault will be done in collaboration with Daniel Defert, Philippe Artieres, Marcus Steinweg, and Guillaume Desanges.

CG: You’ve said many times that your artworks employ philosophy as just another material, like tape or cardboard. Where, then, can it be found in your work? Obviously recorded lectures or photocopied essays are not philosophy — they are merely its physical shell. Can you point out a way in which Foucault’s thinking shaped the way you create art?

TH: But precisely, philosophy is also material. The texts by Marcus Steinweg are philosophical theory and material aswell, and he agrees that I use it as material. He has the liberty and takes the freedom to give me his theory as material. So in my last two works, Unfinished Walls and Stand In, I tried to work with this material by cutting, enlarging, reducing, and extracting from it.

With Marcus Steinweg, we do not work together; it is not a collaboration. Each one is responsible for what he is doing. This work is based on friendship and responsibility between philosophy and art. I try to do something new. I do not need philosophy as an artist — I need philosophy as a human being!

I love the faithful philosophy — the pure, the powerful, the cruel, the sad philosophy of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze, Foucault. Concerning Foucault, I do not understand his philosophy, and I think that I don’t have to understand philosophy in general. I am not a connoisseur. I am not a specialist. I am not a theoretician. But I want to confront, fight and be affected by philosophy in general, and I love Foucault’s refusal to speak for the other.

CG: That brings up another point. Among the people critical of your work, there seems to be a feeling that you incorporate these historical thinkers in a parastic fashion, that you rely on their intellectual stature without contributing to a better understanding of their ideas.

TH: My work definitely cannot avoid misunderstanding, incomprehension, and inattention. I have to accept this, and I have to work with this. I do not complain. I want to judge, and I want my work to be judged. I want to make affirmations in and with my work, and I understand that these affirmations meet incomprehension. I disagree with differentiation, criticism and negativity because I want to work beyond criticism and negativity, and differentiation is only negative, and criticism doesn’t risk anything — it just wants to delimit and exclude. I want to work as a fan.

A fan is someone who shares with other fans the fact of being a fan, not the object of his love. Love is important, not the object of love. I want to be a fan in order to speak directly through my work from one to another. I want to fight against resentment and nihilism, the dictatorship of morality, indifference, and cynicism. I want to act freely in my practice and with what is my own. I don’t have to communicate, to explain, to justify, to argue for my work. My work allows itself to fight against the culture of powerlessness, weakness, depression, and good conscience. I am against the inconsiderate pretentiousness of narcissistic self-fulfillment. I want to act, I want to hope, and I want to be happy!

CG: This past spring, how did you manage to convince the Centre Pompidou to lend so many irreplaceable artworks for the Musée Precaire Albinet, including paintings by Mondrian and Leger? Surely the name of he project [precaire = precarious] must have set off some alarm bells in their collections management department.

TH: I asked the Centre Pompidou to lend original artworks in order to integrate their active part into the Musée Precaire Albinet. The active part from every artwork is the part that wants to change the spectator, that wants to establish the conditions for a direct dialogue from one to the other. That’s why I needed the original artworks. I did not ask for the originals for their heritage value. And I asked with the legitimacy and the expectancy of the housing complex Cité Albinet because the inhabitants wanted the original artworks!

With the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, producer of the Musée Precaire Albinet, I explained the absolute will of the project to the Centre Pompidou, the idea and the aim of the project, as I suppose everyone wanting to borrow work does. We of course had to present guarantees to the museum (insurance, transportation, and humidity and preservation conditions) like everybody. It was not easy to convince them, but it was not impossible either. I think that the implication of the people of the Cité Albinet, their understanding of the project, their acceptance and capacity to accommodate, finally convinced the museum to lend the original artworks. There was a real demand; there was a real project. There is no mission impossible in art. And why should original artwork only be lent to museums in Zurich, London, New York, or Tokyo?

CG: After your three most public undertakings (Deleuze Monument, Bataille Monument, and Musée Precaire Albinet) what is your assessment of the general public’s appreciation of intellectualism? Did your experiences with them alter your faith in the reflective capacities of society at large?

TG: Those projects do create a lot of difficulty, complexity, and beauty. Definitely I know there is a place for art in every person’s brain, and I know that art possesses the tools to enter this space.

CG: Several of the historical artists whose work you included in the Musée Precaire Albinet did not anticipate the effects that time and entropy would have on their works — the cracks in the surface of Mondrian’s paintings, the stains of the facades of Le Corbusier’s buildings. But failure is an element designed in to your work. What do you think is the main difference between your outlook and theirs?

TH: I am not interested in failure. I do not want to fail, but I do not exclude that I can fail, that my work can fail. But it is not an obsession for me. I am interested in energy, not quality. This is why my work looks as it looks! Energy yes! Quality no! I do not want to intimidate nor to exclude by working with precious, selected, valued, specific art materials. I want to include the public with and through my work, and the materials I am working with are tools to include and not to exclude. This is what makes me choose the type of materials I use. It is a political choice. I want to work for a non-exclusive audience because art can only, as art, be open to non-art. Art can only, as art, have a real importance and political meaning.

Thomas Hirschhorn

by Abraham Cruzvillegas

I’ve just received your answers to my questions and your handwritten letter in an envelope at home. They surprised me in a good way. Thank you very much. When asked to write an introduction to the interview, I decided to answer you with an open letter instead.

I think I allowed myself to understand more about your work through “making” questions. When I was asked to participate in a dialogue with you, I gladly accepted, seeing it as an opportunity to think aloud about your work.

When we met some years ago, in 2003, I think, at Cantina Montejo in Mexico City, a block away from where I live, you invited me to visit you in your studio in Aubervilliers. I had imagined it as a place of labor, a place in which art making means the production of knowledge, of language, of emotions, not as a factory or a sweatshop for art, as it often happens these days worldwide. It turns out your studio was actually a former factory, which your activity totally transformed into a place full of creative energy.

When I visited you in France, on a snowy afternoon, in late 2005, Aubervilliers and its surroundings showed me a landscape and an environment that was very different from my idea of what being an artist in Paris was like. This densely populated industrial area on Paris’s outskirts not only provides the city with labor, but also with culture: music, the sport of parkour, tecktonic dance, and verlan slang. From the entrance to your studio I saw the Stade de France, France’s national stadium, Zinedine Zidane and Franck Ribéry’s playground. You gave me and our dialogue several hours (and some tea); it is there that I learned, or perhaps understood, that I could be in a new situation, in a totally different environment and universe: Paris is alive.

Thank you, Thomas.

Un abrazo fuerte.

Abraham

Abraham Cruzvillegas Why live in Paris?

Thomas Hirschhorn Because living in Paris is beautiful. It makes sense for me as an artist and it’s a challenge! I love ordinary, everyday life here and I love the people I’ve met who have become my friends. I stayed in Paris because of the Frenchwomen and Frenchmen that are living here. I like France with all its unresolved contradictions, in all its complexity. I really do love the motto: “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” I take it as something to fight for, at every moment. To live in Paris was never romantic to me. Coming from Switzerland, a very small country, it’s been my effort to confront myself and find out my own measure. This is only possible in a large urban city. I am speaking about “Le Grand Paris” and it’s clear to me that thinking of Paris includes all of its suburbs. To me, the interest and the beauty of working in this country and in this city come from the work of my friend Manuel Joseph, a French poet, but also from many other poets, writers, and philosophers living and working here today. They create a real dynamic. To me this makes Paris a special, powerful, rich, and graceful city of creation. I love to confront the very condensed, critical way of thinking—a sometimes fucking hypercritical thinking—that only the French can produce. I love it; it’s excessive and not always justified, but is terrifically rebellious and crazily resistant. It’s an intellectual pleasure and an artistic challenge to be confronted with such theories. There is also a real Republican, egalitarian tradition which I love. Living in Paris is stimulating and demanding, but I understand the economic pressure as an invitation to face reality. The possibility of being in touch with the sharp thinking of a Frenchman such as Manuel Joseph, without compromise and without reconciliation, gives meaning and reason for me to work here more than in any other city.

AC You worked and lived in Aubervilliers for a while. What does the banlieue mean for you?

TH I am still working in Aubervilliers, where my studio is located. Paris is not Paris without its suburbs. Aubervilliers is a part of Paris. What I need, as an artist, is to live in a space of truth, and this space of truth exists in Paris. As in almost every large city, the space of truth is its suburbs, their so-called banlieues. In Aubervilliers, as in other Parisian suburbs, one can touch the truth and be in contact with it. It’s in the suburbs that there is vitality, deception, depression, energy, utopia, autonomy, craziness, creativity, destruction, ideas, young people, hope, fights to be fought, audaciousness, disagreements, problems, and dreams. It’s in the suburbs that today’s big issues are written on the building facades. It’s in the suburbs that today’s reality can be grasped, and it’s in the suburbs that the pulse of vitality hurts. It’s in the suburbs that there is necessity and urgency. It’s the suburbs that will save the city center from a most certain death! This incredible energy has to be directed somewhere and be fruitful somehow, find a destiny and a response. This is the problem of “small” Paris. The “small” Paris turns its back to all this energy coming from the suburbs. That’s why I am for “Le Grand Paris.”

TH I have a lot of humor. The problem is that others don’t understand it—it’s a pity! And it’s the same thing with the humor in my work. People do not understand that there is humor in my work! More seriously, I think humor can be a path and an opening toward the other. But I do not “deal” with humor in my work, I just want to give it form as much as I can. What is certain is that I have a lot of fun doing my work, always and everywhere—in my studio and in public spaces too. To do my work is not glamorous, but it is a lot of fun. And to do my work is pleasure, it is full enjoyment.

TH Yes, because disaster is part of the world, our one and unique world! I agree with the world I am living in. It is only if I agree with it that I can have the power to change something. To agree does not mean to approve of everything or to support or to endure everything. To agree means to love—to love the world—beyond “respect,” “empathy,” “tolerance,” “compassion,” and “kitsch.” Love is passion, desire, ecstasy, infinitude, and cruelty. As an artist, who is part of the world, I have to confront disaster, my own disaster first, but also all disasters. I have to love this world if I want to change its conditions, I have to love the fact that disaster and “the negative” are also part of it. The world is not the world without the negative. Even within the negative, I have love for art and for artists, love for philosophy and philosophers, love for poetry and poets. This love gives me the energy and the will to create despite all the negative and despite all the past, present, and future disasters. Love is stronger than disaster.

Poor-Racer, 2009, in One-Day Sculpture, Christchurch, New Zealand.

AC What happens to the obscene when we are able to see it?

TH I never use the word obscene or obscenity. I think we are living in a time where words like these are used to impose morality. I refuse this and I refuse the kind of “hypersensitivity” developed and encouraged these days—I am sensitive but no more than any other human being. The Western and Northern luxurious hypersensitivity is the attempt to avoid contact with reality and its hard core. Terms such as obscene are used swiftly in order to protect people from exposure to the truth. Truth needs to be paid for. For there to be truth you have to make a sacrifice. I mean truth—not fact, not opinion, and not information. We are living in a dictatorship of opinions, of facts, and of information. Opinions about what is “obscene,” what is pornographic, and what should not be shown to children! As if everyone and everything should be neutralized by so-called morals or even ethics. There is no longer a single art exhibition without a warning about “obscenity” or “pornography!” But I, as an artist, want to see everything, know everything. I want to be emancipated and sovereign. I do not want to be neutralized. I do not want to be the one saying: “I can’t see this! I don’t want to see it!” I don’t need to be told what to support or not. During the second Iraq war, the former American secretary of defense said: “Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.” That’s exactly the point: in order to discourage inhumanity, we need to see it! As an artist, I don’t want to dream or escape reality.

AC Can you imagine a noncapitalist way or environment for sex? Not efficient, not productive, not amusing, not serious?

TH Sex is apolitical. Sex exists—thank god!—beyond politics. I think the people in North Korea have sex also, don’t they? Sex happens completely and forever beyond everything else. Sexiness is generosity, expenditure, non-economization, emancipation, infinitude, ecstasy, intensity, risk, self-authorization, pride, the absolute. Sex is not reality—sex is the real. And the real—because it is the real—stimulates, boosts, or even dopes and resists all environments and all contexts. And I refuse to fall—like a mouse—into the trap of “noncapitalist” sex!

AC Why collaborate?

TH I do not collaborate and I do not use this term collaboration. I want to work with friends, I want to work in friendship. Working in friendship, as I do with the German philosopher Marcus Steinweg or with the French poet Manuel Joseph, means to work in unshared responsibility. Unshared Responsibility is a new term we created in order to avoid collaboration. Unshared Responsibility means I am completely responsible for the work of my friend, and it means that my friend takes complete responsibility for my work. Unshared Responsibility does not mean discussion, argumentation, negotiation, or finding a compromise. Unshared Responsibility means to be absolutely committed to the work of the other, to take it for what makes its strength: a sovereign affirmation. To work in Unshared Responsibility means to take the responsibility for something I am not responsible for; it means to be generous and it means to have absolute confidence. Unshared Responsibility does not mean to control but to share the love of art, of philosophy, and of poetry. Unshared Responsibility is something I only do with someone and the work of someone I absolutely agree with.

AC Describe chaos.

TH Chaos is form. I want to give form to chaos. Chaos means complexity, inclusion, incommensurability, clarity, precision, exaggeration. Chaos is a tool and a weapon to confront the world, which is chaotic, but not in an attempt to make it more calculated, more disciplined, more educated, more moral, more satisfying, more exclusive, more ordered, more functionable, more stabilized, more simplified, or more reduced. No, chaos is the form to confront the chaotic world. I must specify the chaos, touch it, struggle with it, to finally be lost in it myself. Chaos is another word for ethics. Chaos is resistance, courage, and hope. In art, the question of form is the most important and essential question. I have to struggle with my will, I must give form in the chaos.

AC Sometimes while looking at your work, The Planets by Gustav Holst comes to my mind.

TH I do not know Gustav Holst. Should I know about him?

AC It’s not necessary. What are you listening to recently?

TH I am listening to fado. I have three fado CDs: Maria Teresa, Katia Guerreiro, and Amália Rodrigues. My favorite one is the CD of Amália Rodrigues, Uma Casa Portuguesa. It’s beautiful music and I like to play just one song on the repeat track mode and listen to it for hours. “Barco Negro” is one of those songs—it’s sad, beautifully sad.

AC What’s the meaning of labor in your work? Do you work with assistants?

TH I love to work and I love to do my work. I always liked to work a lot, and because I like it, it’s easy for me to work and work a lot. Because I, the artist, am the art maker, I have to and want to do the work, to give it form and to work it out. I want to be overgiving in my work, I want to work with excess, and I want to be generous while working, I want to self-exploit myself! I like the fact that my work involves a lot of labor. Even when something is big, its big size is made with labor, it’s not blown up industrially. The fact that people can actually see the labor is a way to include them in my work, to make an opening. This opening and including is precisely what I mean by working, or put differently self-erection. To me the term of work and labor are positive terms, terms of self-invention, of self-authorization, and of being mobilized. I am for production and I am for affirmation. To me production is related to dignity and pride. Sometimes people tell me: “Do less! Work much less!” They are wrong, I don’t fall into this trap of nonproduction, into the trap of deception and cynicism. They don’t understand that to work—besides the big pleasure it gives me—is a necessity. It’s the necessity to give form; to assert and to defend my form. It’s necessary to insist by working a lot and by producing a lot. For those who want to do less—it’s fine with me—let them do less, let them produce less. But don’t tell me I should do less! I want to do what I love: to have fun and, to me, to have fun means to do my work! Yes, I do work with assistants.

AC How do you choose materials to work with? Do you choose?

TH I love the materials I am working with. To use the materials I work with is more than a choice—it’s a decision. Doing art politically means loving the material one works with. To love does not mean to be in love in a kitschy way or to fall in love with one’s material or lose oneself in it. Rather, to love one’s material means to place it above everything else, to work with it in awareness, and to be insistent with it. I love the material because I decided in favor of it, therefore I don’t want to replace it, substitute it, or change it. The decision about the material is an extremely important one in art. I decided on the materials I am working with because they are everyday materials. Everyone knows about them, everyone uses them—to do things other than art. These materials surround me, are easily available, unintimidating, and nonartsy. They are universal, economic, inclusive, and don’t bear any plus-value. That is the political, and because I made that decision, I cannot yield to wishes and demands for “something else” or “something new.”

TH I am working on Too Too—Much Much. This is my next big work to be exhibited in the Museum Dhondt Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium. In this work I want to give form to the logic of being overwhelmed by a situation and in assuming the consequences. I will work following my guidelines: Energy: Yes! Quality: No! I have the ambition of creating a new form, to give form to a kind of universal and conflictual hyperconsumption, a form which is the result of confronting three different overconsumptions: 1) The overconsumption of natural disasters; the consequences of being overwhelmed and alone in facing a natural disaster. 2) The overconsumption of the feeling that everything is burning everywhere and everywhere around me; and, 3) The overconsumption of personal and communal human disasters in our lives and their consequences. The question with Too Too—Much Much is: Am I able to give a form which goes beyond usual facts and criticism of consumption? Can I create in my new work some kind of desperate fun that will cut precarious breakthroughs into the hard core of reality?

—Abraham Cruzvillegas’s work has been shown in over 20 countries since 1987. The Mexican artist’s most recent multimedia project, Autoconstrucción—for which he charted the makeshift evolution of his family’s house and neighborhood and found the origins of his sculptural practice—was shown at REDCAT in Los Angeles and Kurimanzutto in Mexico City. He is currently based in Berlin, where he is a DAAD artist-in-residence.

When Swiss-born artist Thomas Hirschhorn visited the Walker last month to install Cavemanman, he spent a few minutes with me discussing the piece, a massive network of tunnels and caves made from cardboard, mailing tape, aluminum foil, and other everyday materials. In this interview, he discusses how his work is a “collage in the third dimension,” the historical and contemporary influences behind the piece, and how a cave is a good metaphor for the mind.

Thomas Hirschhorn: I really try to use materials that everybody knows and uses in their everyday life, not for doing art. It’s very important to me that there is no question about from where the material is coming. So tape, cardboard, paper, photocopies, mailing tubes, silver paper: it’s very important to me to have materials that are in everyday use. Also, I like that [they don’t have] this arty aspect. There’s no kitsch behind it. The question is not what material is it from, the question is what’s it about? That’s why I use this material, because I believethey have a part of universality inside them.

Schmelzer: I also see there are a lot of mass communication, mass-culture items. All the philosophical tracts are Xeroxes, which is a mass production technique, and there’s also stuff from mass media.

Hirschhorn: They are a tool to make a window to another reality, or our reality to another world. I like to start with materials. They are accessible, and they still exist, because in fact it’s about a collage. It’s a collage in the third dimension, not in the 2nd dimension. What means doing a collage? It means to put things together who are not made to be put together. This is a collage, and here it is in the third dimension.

The entrance to Cavemanman in the Walker galleries

Schmelzer: Your politics have been described as radical, but I like to go back to the etymology of words. And radical doesn’t mean “extreme,” it really means “to the roots,” if you break the word apart. Are your politics radical in that traditional sense, or in that earlier sense, that sense that you’re going back to the roots of what’s fundamental about democracy, for example.

Hirschhorn: Absolutely. I’m interested in working politically, not in doing political work. Doing work politically means, yes, to question the material, to question the work that is done, to question every element: is every element I use, is it an offer, is it a key, is it a possibility to give the tool for the spectator to establish a dialogue or a confrontation with the work. That means to me, for example, working politically. In this way, yes, I would like that it has a kind of radicality, but in the small questions of materials, of elements, of light, of space, every question embracing my tool as an artist to give form has to be radical, yes.

Schmelzer: There’s often an immersive quality to your work. It’s often an environment you go into. It seems there’s extremeness in the emotional quality; for example, the piece you did early in 2006 with the images of victims of war (Superficial Engagement) or this one, it’s a bit claustrophobic, it’s lots of shiny things and bright things and bomb metaphors. So you’re dealing with things that are emotionally pretty powerful, but also intellectually powerful: Noam Chomsky and Bataille and Foucault. Is this your way of getting people to react, or is it your way of exploring ideas you care about.

Hirschhorn: To me, it’s never about getting people to react. As you say, the immersive manner: I feel as an artist I have to do too much. I have to do the whole thing. It’s always about the whole world. It’s always about the entire possibility, the entire thing. And of course, that’s pretentious and it’s ambitious, but in another way, it’s stupid, also, to want to do this. I have, as an artist, to stand out this ridiculousness of this ambition and this pretension. It’s always about the whole world. So that’s why I like to be over-formed, to make too much, to put everything inside. To try again and again, to put everything into the work. It’s about me, about how I see, as an artist, I can work. It’s not about a spectator who has to react or not to react or who I want to provoke or not. Never. It’s always about: what’s my tool? I think this is one of my tools; the immersive, the too-much, the stupid, the way to go over something who is permitted in a way.

Schmelzer: This work is all over-the-top consumer society kind of stuff; and the fact that you’re using what could be seen as stuff you’ve found on the street, is there a critique or a way of addressing that—the consumption culture idea?

Hirschhorn: It’s not about a critique of the consumption culture or the consumption society we live in. I’m a part of it. I’m part of this chaotic world. I’m a part of this unclarity in the world. I see as one of my missions as an artist to work in this unclarity, to work in this chaos. Not to bring clarity, not to bring clearness, to struggle with the chaos. To struggle with what’s around me. For example, to work in the chaos of the world means not to me create clear forms, to make less things or make not a lot of things. For me, to go in the same direction and even beyond this chaos and this unclarity is what I think I have to do.

Schmelzer: Now this piece, Cavemanman. You said you’re not trying to say just one thing, but, this obviously is the hermit’s cave, the bin Laden hideout, maybe even the little hole in the ground Saddam was found in, the philosopher’s cave: what was your impulse to begin this project?

Hirschhorn: One of the impulses was: a young man was condemned in France because he was making graffiti in a prehistorical site—

Schmelzer: In Lascaux?

Hirschhorn: Not in Lascaux, near Marseille. He did make graffiti, and what did his people make 30,000 years before? Aren’t they graffitists also? That was one of the points, to say I have to work out an un-hierarchical form, because we know caves—there are also fake caves. There are fake caves that are recent, there are fake caves that are very old. There are caves that have nothing inside—no painting or perhaps the painting disappeared. There are undiscovered caves. So I wanted to give this un-architectural and un-hierarchical space form into the cave. That’s why in fact the idea of a cave arised.

Then, it’s also, I’m Swiss. In Switzerland, we have a lot of caves, but we have also have a lot of tunnels. We’re tunneling all the time because there are big mountains, so this kind of obsession to tunnel, to go through the mountains and make caves in the mountain. Then, of course, the picture you mention of the
cave of Tora Bora or the caves people take to find refuge all over the world. This was the point of start for my work Cavemanman.

Schmelzer: I’m curious about the imagery from magazines here; it seems there’s a lot of images of progress and production and marking—sort of marking the earth much like they’re marking the walls of the cave.

Hirschhorn: Yes, absolutely. We are here in this cavation with these color pictures on the wall. What they share together: people at work. Every one of these people has a mission, has something to do, is at work. So I wanted to connect them to the entire history of caves: where is the space more for contemplation or religious space or a space we don’t for spirit or we don’t know. I wanted to connect it to the reality of work. To me the cave that is just a picture, the cave is in your brain, the cave is in your mind. We have our own layout of a cave in our mind. That is why, in fact, Cavemanman.

Schmelzer: So there’s an archetype of a cave we all kind of—

Hirschhorn: Not an archetype—

Schmelzer: Not an archetype but an individual conception.

Hirschhorn: Absolutely. I believe there is the possibility to structure your mind in a cave with cavations where you put something inside, with garbage, with unspeakable things. We think there’s no light on it, we think they’re forgotten. So, yeah, it’s a metaphor for the space in the mind.

Schmelzer: That leads well to all the books that are here: you have large-scale replicas of books, you have actual texts from different books of philosophy and economics even, it looks like, and political theory. And then there are these bomb-like things connected to them. It seems pretty directly that there’s maybe an explosive potential of knowledge thing, but there must be more than that!

Hirschhorn: Of course, the books are important, but not as material to read, but more as the knowledge was here, but who has to be applicated. It’s about the understanding of the world. It’s not about the knowledge we have or have not. That’s not the question. So it’s about this, that’s also why the books are not reachable in the cavation. The shelves are too high. Here there are text excerpts that could be like a decoration. Of course you can read it, because that’s always the possibility I want to give. Then the enlarged books, of course, that make an engagement to the same time, the book becomes empty because you cannot read it. So it’s important to put together these two meanings.

Finally the dynamite bombs with the books, of course it’s an image, as you say, yeah, the dynamite or the explosive in a book, but also it’s an image to me perhaps also to a paranoia idea of somebody who wants to make fear to someone who comes to discover his cave. Lonely people they have this kind of paranoia, this kind of thinking to protect themselves with this often fake protective materials. It’s another image of somebody retiring himself and trying to confront the world.

Schmelzer: It reminds me of Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber.

Hirschhorn: Absolutely. It’s not about him, but it’s just about this kind of, in a way: you have to confront the world. It’s important not to retire yourself in a cave. But in another way you have to build this cave in your mind and to struggle with what happens in this cave, in confronting it with the world.

Schmelzer: When I first started at the Walker back in ’98, the first piece I saw of yours was, in [the Walker Art Center exhibition] Unfinished History, a big Swiss Army Knife, but I didn’t understand it at all… but the materials, post-9/11, really speak to me much more. When I look around here, I see detritus, the sort of things we all saw blowing through the streets after the World Trade Center fell. Do you see your material differently after a big disaster like that?

Hirschhorn: No. It’s interesting what you say. I saw the pictures, of course, of the dust, for example, after 9/11. I saw the pictures of the millions of papers fluttering down. And, yes, it doesn’t change everything to me, but in a way it’s true. These materials, for example, that could have an importance so much at the moment on somebody’s office desk, and because something completely crazy happened, at a moment everything changed and the paper got completely no more importance to nobody. This is interesting me, because I always believe always… nobody can say to me what’s important to me. Everything can be important to everybody at a moment and at a time. This is the thing I get with this visual experience I had, the importance of things. The importance for one human being, for one element, one shoe or one thing you can see after this kind of incredible event happened; that’s touching me. I was always interested in these elements.

Schmelzer: The other day when we spoke, you mentioned the theme of the larger show this is part of, Heart of Darkness. Does that title or your knowledge of the Joseph Conrad book, does that change how you view this work? What do you think about the theme?

Hirschhorn: I think it’s fantastic. It’s a really great theme. First of all, it’s a really beautiful title, of course. And I think—I’m really happy to be in this exhibition because I think there is really a concern that is so deep in this time today, and I think to these four artists who exhibit, everybody, a kind of big work, who is in a way have built a world for himself, each. It is an ambition to build his own world. I like it a lot. This is really what I want, and perhaps what other artists want—to build a known world and to confront this world directly with the world we are living in. Heart of Darkness is beautiful because there is a heart also, in the darkness, also in the unspeakable, also in something very non-communicatable.

Schmelzer: You just struck on the theme of one of the rooms: “1 man = 1 man.” It strikes me that, much like the marking of a wall of a cave 30,000 years ago or the marking of a graffiti wall today, or the way one person’s life is destroyed in 9/11 is the same as one person’s life being destroyed today in Iraq right now. It seems like there’s that idea here, too, all the way around. This work is going to be hard for people because it’s not pretty, but it seems to have an essential love and equality about it.

Hirschhorn: Yeah, there is a heart. Absolutely. That’s why I like the title (Heart of Darkness). There’s a heart. But I don’t want to be kind, but the heart is the beautiful idea of equality between human beings. In a way I wanted to stupidly write it on the wall like graffiti: one man = one man. But in another way, I needed to build a cave that this idea gets acceptable in away. Everybody says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but…” No, no, no, it’s not about but. It’s not about fact. It’s not about journalism. It’s not about who is wrong and who is right, who is OK, who is not OK. It’s just about this idea: one man = one man. This is why I needed to build the whole cave.

The Headless Artist:

An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn on the Friendship Between Art and Philosophy, Precarious Theatre and the Bijlmer Spinoza-festival

Ross Birrell: Why are you passionate about Spinoza?

Thomas Hirschhorn: I am passionate about Spinoza because the lecture of Ethics had a real impact on me and I am passionate about Philosophy in general because I enjoy not understanding everything. I like the fact that, in Philosophy, things remain to be understood and that work still has to be done. “Ethics” is one of the books which, for me, still remains to be understood. What I have made out so far, is that Ethics is a powerful attempt to fight obscurantism and idealism. Ethics – a book I often look into – is overwhelming in form, logic and clarity. Today more than ever it is necessary to confront this. Reading Spinoza means: accepting to insist on receptivity and sensuality without the idea of a certain type of infinity. According to Deleuze, whoever is interested by philosophy, should start with Spinoza’s Ethics. When you read Spinoza everything is transcendence. But if everything is transcendence then there exists no transcendence. If not transcendence, then everything is immanence. But if everything is immanence, there is no immanence. Spinoza presents a concept devoid of transcendence and devoid of immanence. It is the concept – as Deleuze shows – of Here and Now, the concept of Life – Life as a subject without God. An active subject, a subject of pleasure and leisure. A responsible, gay, assertive subject.

RB: Why did you choose to do the Spinoza-festival in Bijlmer How familiar were the residents of Bijlmer with Spinoza prior to the festival? And were they aware of the potential affinity in terms of immigration? For example, many of the present residents of Bijlmer are immigrants from Suriname, a former Dutch colony and Spinoza arrived in Amsterdam as a foreigner, the son of Portuguese Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition? You have said previously: ‘In my works in public spaces the context is never the issue’ Could the ‘Spinoza-festival’ have taken place anywhere?

TH: “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival” could have taken place in a different neighbourhood than the “Bijlmer”. This work could have been built in another city, another country or another continent. Because Art can provoke a Dialogue or a Confrontation – from one to one – Art can do this everywhere, in the Bijlmer, but anywhere else as well. And because my work is mentally transplantable, it aims to experience its universality.

RB: ‘Foreignness to the world’, claimed Adorno, ‘is an element of art: Whoever perceives it other than as foreign fails to perceive it at all.’1 As with the Deleuze monument (Avignon, 2000) and Bataillemonument (Kassel, 2002), the Bijlmer Spinoza-festival reproduces institutions of the public sphere and commercial life of society (exhibition space, library, theatre, internet café, bar, etc.) formed with familiar everyday materials (tape, cardboard, foil, Perspex, polythene, books, tv sets, computers, etc.). Paradoxically, however, this resemblance is productive of a kind of ‘foreignness’: of the structure to its surroundings, its non-functioning co-existence with community, as an autonomous artwork in society. Do you feel the Monument or the festival remains essentially foreign to the community regardless of the level of ‘participation’ involved?

TH: As always I wanted to do a universal Artwork. I did not conceive “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival” as something which implements “foreignness”. Because Art is universal and because – as always – I aim my work towards a “non-exclusive audience” there was no issue about “foreignness” with the inhabitants of the Bijlmer.

But through the daily experience of “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival” I realized that something unexpected was being shared with the inhabitants of the Bijlmer: the fact of being a “foreigner”. I, myself, was the “foreigner” in their neighbourhood. My project, my will to do it, my everyday battle to keep it standing was the “foreignness”. It was neither the aesthetic nor the production of my work that created “foreignness” but only the fact of decision to do it. This “foreignness” or “strangeness” allowed me to be in equal contact with the Other. As the artist I was the stranger. Being the artist, I must always accept to be the foreigner. This is my starting-point for works done together with inhabitants and has always been. It is not I – the artist – who can help, not I – the artist – who knows how to help, not I – the artist – with the pretension to help, but instead I’m the one – the artist – to have a project and to need help in order to carry it out! I cannot do it alone, I cannot do it without your help!

RB: Can you elaborate on the importance of the ‘guidelines’ of ‘presence and production’ for the Bijlmer Spinoza-festival? The self-demand that you be present throughout the two month long production seems to be more important to the concept of the work than simply to protect the work from vandalism (as was experienced with the Deleuze Monument in Avingon and the Raymond Carver-Altar in Glasgow). Is there a ‘dual perspective’ to be brought to bear in the Bijlmer Spinoza-festival, implied in the combined use of these terms ‘presence’ and ‘production’ – a dialectic of force and consent, akin to the demands upon the actors in ‘precarious theatre’?

TH: “Presence” and “Production” are terms I use for specific projects which require my presence and my production. It means to make a physical statement here and now.

I believe that only with presence – my presence – and only with production – my production – can I provoke through my work, an impact on the field. “Presence” and “Production” is fieldwork, it means confronting reality with the real. “Presence” and “Production” is the form of a commitment toward myself but also directed toward the inhabitants. “Presence” and “Production” is the key to initiate a relationship based on equality – one to one – with the unexpected. “Presence” and “Production” allow me to come in contact with the Other if I give something from myself – first. I know what this means, I know what it demands and I know what I must do in order to achieve this. “Presence” and “Production” are forms of implication towards the neighbourhood through the fact of my presence and my production. A project such as “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival” is only possible because of the three months of presence and production, not only my presence and my production, but also thanks to the presence and production of Marcus Steinweg, the philosopher with his daily lectures, the presence and production of Vittori Martini, the art historian, with her daily implication as “Ambassador” and thanks to the presence and production of Alexandre Costanzo, the editor with his production of the Daily Newspaper.

RB: How does your turn toward ‘Precarious Theatre’ develop or advance your work in relation to precarious form? Has its direct use of actor-spectator relations been informed by experimental theatre directors such as Jerzy Growtowski, in terms of poor materials, or Augusto Boal, in terms of developing the inter-changeablility of the actor and audience developed from Brecht?

TH: “Precarious Theatre” will be the title of one of my next works. It comes directly from my “Spinoza-Theatre” experience which I made and integrated into “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival”. I will develop this experience I had in Amsterdam, of directing the actors from the neighbourhood during two months. I cannot respond precisely to your question as I am not familiar with the two names you mention. But for sure I don’t want to be a theatre-director! I want to integrate a theatrical component into my work, during which the work becomes stage and where people are acting in the work. I call this “Precarious Theatre” because it only lasts for a short moment.

RB: Jean-Luc Nancy writes ‘“Political” would mean a community ordering itself to the unworking of its communication, or destined to this unworking: a community consciously undergoing the experience of its sharing.’2 If the Bijlmer Spinoza-festival is not a work of political art but an example of doing art politically, might it also be considered – in all its multiplicity and diversity of forms and events, its ‘not functioning’ experience, co-existence and autonomy shared with a community – as an ‘unwork’ of art, or an ‘unworking of art,’ and thus ‘political’ in Nancy’s terms?

TH: I do not conceive my work as an outcome of philosophers’ concepts or of theory. I haven’t read the book by Nancy you mention. You must be aware that I really do not read a lot – my friends know this – as I have enough to struggle with and think about with my work (I have not read half of the references you give in this interview). Furthermore I am not constructing my work on Philosophy, theory or thoughts from others but – because I am an artist today – perchance there are moments and spaces of similar dynamics. I am very, very happy about this. I am ready and open for these rare and graceful moments of encounters in concepts and forms which – together with Marcus Steinweg – we call “Friendship between Art and Philosophy”.

I want to point out that when saying ‘not-functioning’ concerning “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival” or other of my works of Art, it is crucial not to forget that an artwork can be something which does not function. (I do not say that Art has no Function but Art does not have to function!) Today the question of functioning (“does it function? does it ‘work’? Is it – then – a success or not?”) arises automatically and quickly as criteria for “good” or “bad” art. This is stupid and easy. I think that the problem is not about doing art which “functions” or “works” but to do an artwork which implicates, which creates an event and which can provoke an encounter or allow encounters. But this is something which cannot be measured, there is no “yes” or “no”, there is no success or failure. Art it is something which reaches us beyond such criteria. To believe in this power of Art is to me what “working politically” as an artist means, trying to resist in and with the work to the pressure of functionality.

RB: Writing on Spinoza Deleuze claims: ‘Writers, poets, musicians, filmmakers – painters too, even chance reader – may find that they are Spinozists; indeed, such a thing is more likely for them that for professional philosophers. It is a matter of one’s practical conception of the “plan”. It is not that one may be a Spinozist without knowing it. Rather, there is a strange privilege that Spinoza enjoys something that seems to have been accomplished by him and no one else. He is a philosopher who commands an extraordinary conceptual apparatus, one that is highly developed, systematic, and scholarly; and yet he is the quintessential object of an immediate, unprepared encounter, such that a nonphilosopher, or even someone without any formal education, can receive a sudden illumination from him, a “flash”.’3 Are “the fiery words of Spinoza” also fanning the flames of the general conflagration of It’s Burning Everywhere (DCA, 19 September-29 Nov 2009)?

TH: Again, I am not illustrating Philosophy with my work. I am not reading Philosophy to do my Artwork and I am not reading Philosophy to justify my work. I need Philosophy for my life, to try to find responses to the big questions such as “Love”, to name one of the most important to me. For this, I need Philosophy – please believe it! But of course if connections, dynamics, influences or coincidences exist in my work – as you pointed out in “It’s Burning Everywhere” – I am absolutely happy. I want to be touched by grace, without belief in any correlation to genius or obscureness or that it has something to do with artistic ignorance. If you are working today in the historical field of the moment you live in, confronting all kinds of complexities, struggling with all kinds of paradoxes and contradictions, if you are still working and continue listening only to yourself, it is only normal that at some point your work is going to be a “flash”. Your quotation of Deleuze is truly an important citation to me, because it explains why I started, myself, to read Spinoza. As Deleuze with Spinoza, I – as an artist – admire how great Philosophers had interest and commitment in other thinkers and how these great Philosophers are the most able to explain the concepts of other Philosophers with their own words.

RB: Alain Badiou says in Saint Paul ‘it is necessary to pay careful attention to Paul’s lexicon, which is always extremely precise.’4 In my experience you always take great care and consideration over the language you use, via deployment of a similarly ‘precise lexicon’ to articulate your position as an artist and to distance yourself from definitions drawn from the critical vocabularies of ‘relational aesthetics,’ ‘community-based’ or ‘public art’. Why is a commitment to self-determination in writing necessary for you as an artist? Is it an ethical obligation?

TH: One thing I really understand is that in philosophy terms and notions are important. Philosophers use words with preciseness and exactitude. Philosophers are sculpting concepts following their logic in the strongest way they can. The words they use are important tools to them in order to create new terms in philosophy. I admire that enormously.

As an artist I am often surprised by effortless, inexact and empty terms or notions used in order to “explain” an artwork. I am astonished by the repeated and thoughtless use of terms in art critique. As the artist – I refuse to use them myself when I think it is not the right word to describe what I want. I have to invent my own terms and I want to insist with my own notions. I know – as an artist – that to give Form is the absolute necessity and that writing is not a necessity, but writing helps me clarify, it helps me fix and be committed to things.

Writing is a help to understand, to touch, to speak about something. But it’s only a help, my work does not depend on it. Therefore, when writing, I try – at least as the artist – to use the terms I think appropriate in relation to my work. And as a help, it is an ethical obligation towards my own work.

RB: Your work has had a long engagement with precarity and the precarious and you have used the term repeatedly in terms of materials, structures, the situation in public spaces and the question of form, each of which speak to the precarity of objects, power relations, communities and, above all, life. It seems that recently thinkers have begun to catch up with your understanding of precarious life asserted through form. For example, Judith Butler, Precarious Life (2004)and more recently Frames of War (2009) where she states: ‘Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other.’5 Has your adherence to precarity been informed by thinkers of ‘the other’ such as Butler or Levinas?

TH: Again no, my adherence to precarity comes from my life, from my experience, from what I love – from the precarious forms I love – and from what I understand of it. I am really pleased to hear that Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas and also Manuel Joseph (a French writer and friend) have, among many others, developed serious thoughts about “Precariousness” but I must tell you, I learnt this myself and I am not going to learn something more about it. On the contrary, my tendency is – I admit – to avoid going “deeper” – because I need, yes I need, my own, my own strange, wrong, headless misunderstood, bad, stupid – but – my fucking own relation to preserve and to develop. This is not an opposition to theory or a refusal of theory, absolutely not. It has to do with being open to what comes from my own, to what comes only from my own. It just makes me happy to hear that I am not alone with the interest in “Precarity”. And I have the ambition in doing my work to intervene – through the notion of “Precarity” – in the field of Art.

RB: On the Spinoza-Monument at W139 Amsterdam 1999 you state that you wanted some elements to be ‘more overtaxing to myself’, and in the text ‘Doing art politically: What does this mean?’ you talk about ‘not economizing oneself; self-expenditure … undermining oneself; being cruel vis-à-vis one’s own work…’ In terms of expenditure, this equates to an economy without reserve, of giving yourself without reserve and shares a logic of sacrifice familiar to the writings of Artaud or Georges Bataille on the ‘potlatch’. As the language of sacrifice and annihilation at work here suggests (you make altars after all), does the work ever reach the final point of ‘self-cancellation’ or creative ‘auto-destruction’?

TH: There is a difference between self-expenditure, being cruel vis-à-vis my own work, not-economizing myself and what you call “self-cancellation” and “auto-destruction”. I want to undermine myself – my person – in doing my work – I do not want to undermine my work!

I don’t want to take myself seriously in doing my work but I want to do and take my work seriously! I want to give everything I can in order to do my work but I do not want to give my work away! The gift is not the work itself – the gift is to do it and to do it in such a way! What I love in the notion of “gift” is the offensive, demanding and even aggressive part in it, it’s the part that provokes the Other to give more! It’s the part which implies a response to the gift, a real and active response. The gift or the work must be a challenge, that is why I am not using “auto-destruction”. “Self-cancellation” to me is related to narcissism, to tearfulness and I want to resist to the fashionable tendency to self-criticism. Those terms are not related to my understanding of Art as an assertion, an absolute assertion of form, as an engagement, as a commitment to pay for, as a mission, as a never-ending conflict, as a strength and as a position.

RB: You write: ‘I want to show my work everywhere, without making any distinction between important and unimportant places, just as I don’t want to distinguish between important and unimportant people.’6 This position coincides with Rancière’s claim: ‘There is no more a privileged form than there is a privileged starting point. Everywhere there are starting points, intersections and junctions that enable us to learn something new…’.7 Is equality the foundation and condition of the universal artwork? Is such universality potentially a form of emancipation?

TH: Universality is constitutive to Art. It’s something very important to me. One can say that Art is universal because its Art. If it is not universal it is not an Artwork, it’s something else. I do oppose the term “Universality” to Culture, Tradition, Identity, Community, Religion, Obscurantism, Globalization, Internationalism, Nationalism or Regionalism. I experienced with my Artwork – and not only with the works in public space – that Universality is truly essential. There are other words for Universality: The Real, The One World, the Other, Justice, Politics, Aesthetics, Truth, the “Non-exclusive Audience” and Equality. I believe – yes, believe – in Equality. And I believe that Art has the Power of transformation. The power to transform each human being, each one and equally without any distinction. I agree that equality is the foundation and the condition of Art.

RB: Would you regard yourself as an Ignorant Artist?

TH: I am not an ignorant artist – because it’s better not to be ignorant, as artist! Of course – I love the beautiful book The Ignorant Schoolmaster and its fantastic enlightening title, but I am not a Schoolmaster – I am not even teaching Art – I am an artist! I, myself, am and want to be a Headless artist. I want to act – always – in headlessness, I want to make Art in headlessness. “Headlessness” stands for: doing my work in and with precipitation, restlessness, acceleration, generosity, expenditure, energy (energy = yes! quality = no!), stupidity, self-transgression, blindness and excess. I never want to economize myself and I know – as the artist – that I sometimes look stupid facing my work, but I have to stand out for this ridiculousness.

RB: To state ‘I’m a Worker-Soldier artist’ suggests the identity of the ‘partisan’ and elsewhere, in relation to the philosophers you have used in your work, you have insisted that you are not a specialist but a fan. Do you see a connection between ‘the partisan’ and ‘the fan’?

TH: With “worker” I wanted to point out the importance of the work, the importance of production and the importance to do it. Being a “worker” also means to refuse the terms “genius”, “star”, “prince or princess” and the term “child of miracles”. With “soldier” I want to point out that I have to fight for my work, for my position, for my form, I want to point out that this fight is never won but also never lost, I want to point out that doing art is a perpetual battle and I want to point out that to be an artist means to have a mission. With “artist” I want to point out that I have to stand up, I have to assert and I have to give form to what is important to me. I ask myself; does my work have the power to reach a public beyond the public already interested in art? Can I, through my artwork, create and establish a new term for art? And I ask myself: can my work create the condition to develop a critical corpus? A fan is somebody who loves beyond justification, beyond explication and beyond reason. Being a fan means to love.

RB: The Swiss writer, Robert Walser who led a ‘wandering and precarious existence’ has been important to you (Robert Walser Tränen, 1995, Robert Walser Kiosk 1999 (Universität Zürich-Irchel, Zurich) and he appears more than once in your Emergency Library (2003). Walser speaks of the ‘courage to create’ and commands: ‘The poet must ramble, must audaciously lose himself, must always risk everything, everything, must hope, should do so, should only hope.’8 How important is Walser to you? Do you share Walser’s hope in extremis?

TH: Robert Walser is one of the most inspired and inspiring Swiss writers. Because of the strength and power of his soul, Robert Walser is a Swiss hero. He reconciles me with my home country – with the specificity of living in Switzerland – which can create graceful writers such as Robert Walser. I love his work which is the work of existential perdition and existential uncertainty. Robert Walser himself lost his way between rebellion and gaiety. I love Robert Walser and – as many others – I am part of the “Tanner family”. And as many, I love his work with a possessive, selfish and exclusive love – I won’t share this love with anyone else, I alone have “understood” Robert Walser!

RB: Might another name for the non-exclusive audience be Multitude?

TH: No. “Multitude” to me is an imprecise and an elastic term. I invented the term of “non-exclusive audience” and I want to insist upon it, because it permits me to clearly address my work to an audience, to somebody, to a person, to one singular person. The “non-exclusive audience” is the term which allows me to direct my work toward the Other. The Other or the “non-exclusive audience” is inclusive. So the “non-exclusive audience” includes also the “spectre of evaluation” (The Institution director, Art critic, Curator, Gallerist, Collector, Art historian and Art professor). I think that – as an artist – I can’t ever direct my work toward the ”spectre of evaluation”. The “non-exclusive audience” permits me not to focus my work on the “spectre of evaluation” but to include them beside an unexpected and open audience. Furthermore, the “non-exclusive audience” is able to judge the work of the artist – directly from the heart – whereas the “spectre of evaluation” only evaluates the work.

RB: In his discussion of Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau comments, ‘The theory of hegemony presupposes, … that the “universal” is an object both impossible but necessary’.9 Is your quest to produce the universal artwork both impossible but necessary?

TH: Each Artwork is impossible. It is impossible because it’s just not necessary to do a possible Artwork! An Artwork is an impossible form and an impossible assertion and it’s impossible to defend it. Doing an Artwork – I think – is not “impossible but necessary” but it is: “impossible and necessary”. An Artwork must possess both: “impossibility and necessity”. Don’t both together make sense? Don’t both together create density, charge and energy? Don’t “impossibility and necessity” – together – give beauty?

RB: Is there a connection for you between your insistence upon the autonomy of the art work and autonomous political movements, for example in political anarchism or the Italian autonomists? I’m recalling here the improvised structure Bridge (2000) which joined the Whitechapel Art Gallery to neighbouring Freedom Press in Angel Alley in the East End of London and also the participation in the Bijlmer Spinoza-festival of Antonio Negri.

TH: No, there is no connection that I could establish. I just believe in the autonomy of Art – because it’s Art – and I do think that it is the autonomy of an Artwork which gives it its absoluteness. “Autonomy” does not mean self-sufficiency or self-enclosure, “autonomy” is something which stands up by itself, which is sovereign and proud.

I invited Toni Negri because I admire his work and his life. And of course for his beautiful book: The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. His lecture and the small seminar he held, during which he explained his ‘first love” of the notion “precarity”, was for me a moment of grace at “The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival”.

RB: In ‘Doing art politically: What does this mean?’ you write, ‘I decided to position my work in the form- and force-fields of Love, Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics’. This seems to echo the four categories of truth adhered to by Alain Badiou who also puts love ‘which alone effectuates the unity of thought and action in the world’ on an equal footing with philosophy, politics and art because of its capacity to act as a universal power. Is love for you another name for universality?

TH: When I decided myself upon these four notions as constitutes for my force- and form-fields, I wanted to use four terms or notions that define a sort of conflict zone – an area that my work always wants to touch. That is why: Love, Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics. My work need not cover these zones equally or entirely, but I always want to touch all four terms of this zone within my work. But to me, the two terms “Politics” and “Aesthetics” are much more “negatively loaded” than the others two terms “Love” and “Philosophy” which are much more “positively loaded”. Within the force- and form-field itself, I want problematic and conflict to be clearly pointed out so that my form- and force-field is itself understood as a zone of conflict as an “in-fight”.

I am not afraid to say I love the materials I am working with – of course not with self-sufficient and sentimental Love but with the Love of the decision I took to use them, specifically. Because I love them I do not want and can not change them! Because I love them I am committed and engaged with them, this is Love.

“Love” is also another word for passion, cruelty, infinitude and ecstasy and also universality. “Love” means to me, to love someone: Duchamp, Bataille, Deleuze, Malevitch, Beuys, Warhol, Spinoza, Gramsci, Mondrian.

RB: Would you regard yourself as a militant? Of art? Of truth?

TH: I am not a militant of Art because I am an artist. I am the art maker! Art is my passion and I am passionate to be an artist. As an artist – I am a militant of Truth. I believe in the capacity of art to create – through its form its own Truth. A Truth as opposed to information, objectivity, circumstance, context, conditions, correctness, historicism, documentation, opinion, journalism, criticism, morality.

RB: Through the varied alcoves, monuments, kiosks, altars, festivals, emergency libraries you assert a series of ‘elective affinities’ with dead philosophers and dead writers. This is reminiscent of Bataille when he writes: ‘The desire to communicate is born in me out of a feeling of community binding me to Nietzsche, and not out of isolated originality.’10 Is this an ethical commitment on your part, to assert an ‘inoperative community’ with the dead?

TH: No, the explanation is much more profane. An “Altar”, a “Kiosk” and a “Monument” can only by done for dead people. But the “dead” in itself play no role in it, because my work is not about the death of that person, my work is about the life and the work of that person! As an homage to somebody it is simpler to take a person whose life and work are fulfilled. But, as an homage, it is not excluded – even if less simple – to do a work about the work of a living person. This year I will do an exhibition “Exhibiting Poetry Today: Manuel Joseph”. It will be about the work of a living French poet and a friend, Manuel Joseph, this exhibition can be understood of course as an homage.

9 Ernesto Laclau, ‘Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics’ in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 44-89.

Dealers Report a Flurry of Sales at Frieze London 2016

The 14th edition of Frieze London previewed on Wednesday to what was described by most dealers as a “flurry of sales” and a much more dynamic first day than at the 2015 edition.

This was particularly evident for blue-chip galleries, those occupying the areas near the fair’s entrance, which this year—after yet another re-design by Universal Design Studio—has two different access points instead of just one, preventing the bottle-neck that used to clog the front aisles.

In the first hours, David Zwirner sold a new $1 million painting by Kerry James Marshall that will go to a major American museum, and another work by Marshall for $600,000 to a private collection. A new painting by Yayoi Kusama also sold for over $1 million, while a 2016 Bridget Riley painting worth £700,000 was bought by an Asian collector.

Additional sales at Zwirner included two new oil and charcoal on linen works by Chris Ofili, worth $380,000; two new sculptures by Carol Bove for $375,000 each; a Thomas Ruff photograph for €85,000; and a number of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans ranging from $8,000 to $80,000, which also sold on day one.

View of the Hauser & Wirth booth at Frieze London 2016. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

Hauser & Wirth sold a number of works from its eye-catching and crowded (featuring a whopping 46 artists) “L’atelier d’artistes” booth, including sculptures by Fischli / Weiss and Thomas Houseago (for $75,000); a Rodney Graham lightbox; several works by Phyllida Barlow, including a small sculpture for £50,000; and a Jack Whitten work on canvas for $45,000, all of which changed hands on day one, alongside works by Henry Moore and Louise Bourgeois, among others.

“It was a great start to the opening,” Neil Wenman, senior director at Hauser & Wirth told artnet News on Thursday morning. “I think the thematic booth got a lot of attention which drew lots of people in, and we did make quite a lot of sales. The atmosphere is really different this year, it was really jovial, also because our booth had such a strong theme, and even music.”

Overall, this year’s edition felt more pared down and elegant, with more galleries choosing to show modern artists. Could this be influenced by Frieze London’s successful younger sibling, Frieze Masters, also evidenced in the higher number of curated booths and throwback presentations?

“I think so,” said Wenman. “I think The Nineties section was a great example of that cross-historical look. There’s definitely a sense of contemporary art galleries looking back, but questioning it through a modern lens.”

Contemporary works, however, were high in demand. Over at Timothy Taylor, the London-based gallery reported strong sales at its solo booth of work by Brooklyn-based artist Eddie Martinez, selling 14 sculptures on the first day for prices ranging from $12,000 to $15,000.

Maureen Paley sold a £150,000 sculpture by Rebecca Warren, dated 2005-2016, to a British collector, as well as an installation by Paulo Nimer Pjota, titled Vaporware, some samples (2016), to a New York-based collector for $24,000. On the first day, Wolfgang Tillmans’s photo Kleine Welle (2015) sold to a US collector for $120,000.

Grayson Perry poses in front of one his works at the Victoria Miro booth at Frieze London 2016. Photo by Linda Nylind, courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

Victoria Miro reported strong sales in the very first hours, during which a number of works by Grayson Perry, including sculptures and tapestries changed hands for prices ranging from £50,000 to £450,000. A series of recent paintings by Yayoi Kusama (with prices ranging $400,000 to $1 million) were also a hit with collectors, as were a series of paintings by Chantal Joffe depicting strong Jewish women, including Betty Friedan, Hannah Arendt, Claude Cahun, and Gertrude Stein, with prices between £10,000 and £30,000, a number of which sold in the first morning.

Pace Gallery sold a new LED light work by Leo Villareal entitled Radiant Wheel, (2015) for $100,000. The gallery also sold a new marble bust by Kevin Francis Gray for £80,000; a small minimalist painting made of copper wire and gesso by Prabhavathi Meppayil for $20,000; and two life size works by Kohei Nawa priced at $380,000 and $230,000.

Simon Lee sold works by Hans-Peter Feldmann between €50,000 and £90,000 on day one, and paintings by Paulina Olowska for around $80,000 on day two. Meanwhile, Berlin’s Esther Schipper reported a number of sales, including Ryan Gander’s bronze sculpture Elevator To Culturefield (2016) which sold for well over £80,000.

“The fair has been great to work with as every year and has managed to attract more collectors from Asia and Middle East than previous editions. First day sales have been very strong and I am particularly happy to present Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s historical work R.W.F. in The Nineties section,” Schipper told artnet News.

Meanwhile, Sprüth Magers sold two 2009 Craig Kauffman acrylic and glitter sculptures for $125,000 each on the first day, while the second day brought the sale of the seminal Sylvie Fleury at its booth over at The Nineties section, presented in collaboration with Salon 94 and Mehdi Chouakri.

New York galleries also did extremely well. Casey Kaplan sold out the majority of its stand in the first hours, including works by Kevin Beasley, Giorgio Griffa, Garth Weiser, N.Dash, and Sarah Crowner, while P.P.O.W. reported strong sales including several Betty Tompkins paintings for $3,000 to $3,500; photographs by Portia Munson at $15,000; and works by Martin Wong, ranging from $25,000 to $200,000.

David Kordansky Gallery sold the majority of its booth in the first hours, with most of the interest coming from non-British collectors. A new painting by Harold Ancart sold for $85,000 to an American collector. Mary Weatherford’s Spike Driver’s Moan (2016) sold to an Asian collector for $185,000, and Kathryn Andrews’s Black Bars (Dejeuner No. 1) from 2016 sold for $68,000 to an American institutional collector.

South Africa’s Goodman Gallery also reported a strong start, with early sales including William Kentridge’s drawing Observer (2016) for $450,0000; a Mikhael Subotzky photo from 2006 for $15,000; and a recent work by ruby onyinyechi amanze on graphite, ink, and photo transfers, for $8,000.

William Kentridge, Observer (2016). Courtesy Goodman Gallery.

The top galleries from São Paulo couldn’t complain either. Galeria Fortes Vilaça sold two new works by Erika Verzutti, with prices ranging from $45,000 to $50,000; and two new works by Leda Catunda, for prices ranging from $25,000 to $60,000. Galeria Luisa Strina sold three works by Leonor Antunes, acquired through the Frieze Tate Fund to join the Tate collection, as well as works by Fernanda Gomes, Laura Lima, Marcius Galan, Tonico Lemos Auad, and two drawings by Anna Maria Maiolino.

Mendes Wood, also from São Paulo, sold works by Lucas Arruda, Sonia Gomez, Patricia Leite, Luiz Roque, Daniel Steegmann Mangrane, and Mariana Castillo Deball, while Galeria Vermelho sold a 2014 work by Dora Longo Bahia for $25,000.

The works by Leonor Antunes sold at Luisa Strina weren’t the only pieces that have been bought through the £150,000 Frieze Tate Fund, supported for the first time by WME | IMG. The six-person international jury, composed of four Tate curators and two guest curators, also selected six artworks by the Turkish artist Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin, acquired from Rampa, Istanbul; and one work by the Malaysian artist Phillip Lai, acquired from Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London.

London’s Laura Bartlett sold a unique photograph by Elizabeth McAlpine for £15,000, as well as two works by Lydia Gifford for £6,200, a painting by Sol Calero for £11,000, and a wall-based work by Maria Lund for £5,200.

Younger galleries, those located more towards the back of the tent, also had an exciting start. Vienna’s Galerie Emanuel Layr sold a number of paintings by Nick Oberthaler, priced at €20,000. Athens’ The Breeder sold a brilliant installation by Angelo Plessas, who’s participating in the forthcoming Documenta 14, for $34,000 to a European collector; as well as a delicate bead curtain by Zoë Paul to a London-based collector, for $15,000.

Works by Angelo Plessas and Zoë Paul at the booth of The Breeder at Frieze London 2016. Photo Lorena Muñoz-Alonso.

So what about the dreaded Brexit and the depreciation of the pound? Has the uncertainty been harmful for the British art market at all, as speculators were quick to predict?

“I think it might have come out as a positive at the moment,” Neil Wenman, senior director at Hauser & Wirth, told artnet News. “Sales have been really strong at Frieze London but particularly strong at Frieze Masters this year, with some of the really high value works we’ve put on display selling, so perhaps this is a particularly strong time for works priced in pounds, as the currency is weak at the moment. If you are an international collector, the pound is weak, so things are cheaper. We’ve definitely seen a strong start to the season. It was a very long summer with lots of uncertainty, politically, with terrorism, Brexit… But now we are up and running, and we are excited,” he added.

Although it’s too early to say, judging by the excitement of dealers across the fair and the encouraging results of the London auctions this week, it might seem as if, after the doom and gloom of previous months, the market could be perking up again. All eyes will now be on the sales results at Paris’ FIAC and Art Basel Miami.

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The rich legacy of Leslie Waddington | Amid talk that market contraction and post-EU referendum jitters would hit London’s autumn season, Frieze Week kicked off in confident style with a white glove sale of the Leslie Waddington Collection at Christie’s. The 100 per cent sold rate and £28,285,525 total was testament to the late art dealer’s reputation as tastemaker and collector in his own right. It started with a portrait of Waddington by Peter Blake, which sold for double its estimate at £81,250. The plum lot, as expected, was Jean Dubuffet’s Visiteur au chapeau bleu (‘Visitor with Blue Hat’) from 1955, which also doubled its estimate and sold for £4.81 million.

Meanwhile, Waddington Custot gallery (which Waddington Galleries became in 2011 when Stephane Custot bought the late Lord Bernstein’s share) exhibited at Frieze Masters for the first time, its stand hung with the raw, ravaged canvases of the Spanish painter Manolo Millares (1926–72). The abstracts, dating from 1956 to 1970, were priced between £170,000 to around £900,000, and the earliest, Composición con dimensión perdida, sold on preview day. Other early sales at the fair included Elements V (1984) by Brice Marden, which had an asking price of $5 million, and a painting by Wayne Thiebaud (asking price £1.5 million), both at Acquavella Galleries (New York).

Solo booths set the tone | ‘Our artists love this fair. Lots of them visit, because they all collect, but not the obvious things. You find the unusual here’. So said David Cleaton-Roberts, director of Alan Cristea Gallery, sitting on the gallery’s stand at Frieze Masters devoted to the prints of Anni Albers, one of numerous stands at both this fair and Frieze London to concentrate on female artists. Solo artist presentations, traditionally seen as putting all one’s eggs in one basket, are increasingly popular and Cleaton-Roberts is pleased with the gallery’s single-artist format; last year it presented Richard Hamilton; in 2014, Josef Albers. By Friday afternoon of this year’s fair, it had sold more than 20 Anni Albers prints, priced between £2,000 and £6,000. At the moment they’re still affordable,’ Cleaton-Roberts said, adding that the artist will be the subject of a major exhibition in the UK, yet to be announced, in the next few years. She may not be so cheap for long.

New galleries in London | Alan Cristea Gallery also opened a large new space on Pall Mall last week, one of a gaggle of new galleries to open spaces in London during, or in time for Frieze Week. Others included Cabinet Gallery in Vauxhall and, in St James’s and Mayfair, Colnaghi, Skarstedt Gallery, Carpenter’s Workshop Gallery, Limoncello, Cardi Gallery, and Almine Rech Gallery, which opened with a divisive Jeff Koons show. Brexit or not, London seems only to gain in appeal as an essential gallery hub.

Adrian Ghenie and Pino Pascali lead at Christie’s | This has been Adrian Ghenie’s year; the 39-year-old Romanian painter is the market darling of 2016. At Christie’s 6 October evening sale of post-war and contemporary art, which totalled just shy of £34.3 million, the vast, brooding Nickelodeon (2008) made an artist record at £7.11 million, four times the £1.5 million estimate.

Nickelodeon (2008), Adrian Ghenie. Image courtesy Christie’s

‘The Ghenie market had been growing, growing, growing,’ said Francis Outred, European head of post-war and contemporary art. ‘This was the culmination, and it is widely acknowledged as one of his best works.’ Nickelodeon was guaranteed by a third party who ‘proactively approached’ Christie’s, said Outred, a phenomenon they find is ‘increasingly common’ on desirable high-value works.

A sign of a contracted but hardened market, this was another ‘tightly curated’ (or small) auction of 41 lots, more conservative in content than the larger, more speculative contemporary sales of old. However, Christie’s sale did offer works by several up-and-coming artists under 40; alongside Ghenie, records were set for Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Lucy McKenzie, and Henry Taylor.

Immediately afterwards, in the 59-lot Italian sale, seven new artist records were set, including for the Arte Povera artist Pino Pascali, whose joyful Code di Delfino (‘Tail of a Dolphin’) sold for £2.7 million.

Frans Hals forgery sets tongues wagging | Art fairs love a scandal. After all, what better way to fill those long dull hours on a stand than with a little gossip. Talk of Frieze Masters has been the story of a fake Frans Hals , following Sotheby’s revelation that a portrait by the Dutch artist that was sold to a US buyer by private treaty for £8.4 million in 2011 has been reassessed as a fake (as reported in theFinancial Times). Sotheby’s refunded the buyer in full for the work after pigment tests showed the work was ‘undoubtedly a forgery’. A forger of exceptional talent, it seems – and other works are now under suspicion.

What Sold at Frieze London and Frieze Masters

Uncertainty has been the chorus to each of this year’s major art market events—and the pervading sentiment across the wider economy as well. Brexit, the U.S. election, and concerns about the underlying fundamentals of a global economy propped up by low, and in some cases negative, interest rates have weighed on collectors’ minds and lightened dealers’ wallets. As Frieze London and Frieze Masters readied to kick off this week in tandem with London’s major fall auctions, the political and economic climate got a bit more certain—but not in the way many had wished.

At the U.K.’s Conservative Party conference this week, Prime Minister Theresa May quashed any lingering hopes among Londoners that their government would simply never invoke Article 50, the provision of the Lisbon Treaty that starts a two-year clock for Britain to officially leave the EU. That process, the PM declared, would begin in March 2017. Next on the list of crushed dreams was the prospect of a so-called “soft Brexit,” in which the U.K. government would aim to negotiate lenient immigration policies with the EU in order to be able to more greatly benefit from the Union’s single market. No, May’s statements suggest, immigration restrictions outweigh the importance of low-friction trade with the EU, where 44% of British exports are currently sent.

Both moves have been cast by business leaders, collectors at Frieze among them, as yet another indication that the British political apparatus is more interested in populist sentiment than in the fundamentals of its economy—and intends to continue to enact policies anathema to the business and financial community at large. This populism is of course rife across the political scene of the world’s major economies and art market behemoths at present, from the rise of Germany’s Frauke Petry-led far-right party, AfD, to the potential U.S. presidency of Donald J. Trump. In the U.K., concerns about the implications of May’s comments caused the pound to plunge to a new 31-year low. It closed out the week at just $1.24, after recovering from a flash crash early Friday morning when the pound was priced momentarily for as low as $1.18. By some measures, this now places Britain’s economy behind that of France.

To the credit of Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips, London’s auctions succeeded in painting a picture of the market in rebound against this backdrop, thanks to a handful of record-setting sales and many more above-estimate results. But, in many cases, those estimates were set very low. And it would be premature to make too much of a connection between what happened in the secondary market this week and the current state of play for gallerists and dealers like those exhibiting at Frieze.

For example (at the risk of being overly didactic), when a work hits the auction block, you have a few minutes to purchase it, locking in what might be a favorable price and, in the case of this week, a very low exchange rate. In most cases at a fair or in a gallery you have days, if not months, to pull the trigger on a purchase—particularly in the current climate. And with these prices negotiable, it’s less likely the pound’s sway one way or another will end up strongly affecting your outlay. Spot a painting you love along Frieze’s aisles? It can probably wait until November 9th. Better yet, hold up until Q2 of next year when we have a clearer picture of how well the global economic engine is actually purring along.

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There is little debate that serious collectors were still buying at Frieze, and that many dealers made out quite well. But there is equally little debate that this is a very different market than we’ve experienced in the past few years. A number of dealers typically eager to publically report sales were mum this year. According to both major blue-chip players and young gallerists, this is due in part to pressure being placed on them by artists whose works traveled to the fair and haven’t sold—more so than to increased confidentiality around actualized transactions. That should give some indication of a financial squeeze being felt not just by some gallerists but by artists, too.

Like many markets at this moment of unsteadiness, the art market is heavily focused on underlying fundamentals. That means scrutiny of an artist’s CV, the collections in which his or her work is held, and, for secondary market pieces, provenance. And it’s good news for certain sectors of the market that had more recently languished while attention focused only on the new and young. “It’s great to see artists getting attention like Steven Claydon, Evan Holloway, and Kathryn Andrews,” said David Kordansky Gallery partner and director Mike Homer. “They’re mid-career artists and have the critical support and the CV to back it up but are also at a reasonable price point; the market is not inflated.” He cited sales of a new painting by the London-based Claydon for $30,000, three sculptures by Holloway for $50,000 apiece, and two paintings from Andrews’s “Black Bars” series, selling Black Bars: Dejeuner No. 1 (Girl with Napkin, Visor, Lemon, Lighter and Shuttlecock) (2016) for $68,000.

“Considering the turbulent economic climate, especially here in London, we didn’t know what to expect going in,” said Homer. The Los Angeles-based director added that while that climate means people were by no means clamoring to buy work in the first few minutes and hours of the fair, the outing could still be considered a success. Kordansky further sold an untitled Harold Ancart painting from this year for $85,000, Mary Weatherford’s Spike Driver’s Moan (2016) for $185,000, and one edition of Torbjørn Rødland’s Cake (Studio 798) (2008–16) for $13,000.

Collectors’ increasing desire to buy works with a proven track record continues to push dealers to acquire more artists’ estates. And even at Frieze London, technically meant to be a fair for contemporary art, historical work cropped up in a number of booths. By far the most prevalent—indeed, almost overflowing—with works sourced from estates was Hauser & Wirth’s stand, modeled after a fictional artist’s studio and hung with some 140 works by 47 artists, priced between $3,000 and $3.5 million. According to senior director Neil Wenman, who curated the booth, around half of those works are from estates. “Because the concept is contemporary, it allowed us to pull out works from the ’40s and ’50s to add fuel to the fire,” he said.

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Among the gallery’s sales made at Frieze London were a Francis Picabia work on paper; a Henry Moore bronze maquette for CHF 48,000; sculptures by Phyllida Barlow, Berlinde De Bruyckere, and Thomas Houseago for £50,000, €130,000, and $75,000, respectively; and two Richard Jackson neons for $20,000 apiece. “It’s important to let people understand the similarities between older art and contemporary,” Wenman said of the idea behind the booth, pointing to a pair of David Smith works on paper, which flanked a Moore work and a drawing by a gallery technician named Gary McDonald. “Of all of them, Gary’s sold. He’s an artist in his own right, just not the stature of David Smith or Henry Moore—yet.” The director said that “sales, especially at Masters, have been very high,” the gallery having placed a number of works—including an over half-million-dollar Dieter Roth cheese painting, a $600,000 stabile by Alexander Calder, a Fausto Melotti sculpture for €300,000, and a Picabia painting for $220,000—early in the fair.

The blurred lines between modern and contemporary could be seen at the number of dealers like Hauser & Wirth with stands at both Frieze fairs this week. Another was London’s Timothy Taylor. “Over the last 18 months there’s been a movement away from the new, fast, and young and onto great modern artists who, when seen in the right light, look contemporary and relevant. Maybe there’s an inherent value in that maturity and a conservatism creeping into the market,” said Taylor, who pointed to the wall of works by Hans Hartung that make up the back of his stand at Masters but could just as easily have been made by a young artist showing at Frieze London’s Focus section.

Taylor nonetheless reported having sold best thus far from his solo booth of Eddie Martinez’s bronze sculptures at Frieze London. (Frieze Masters is a longer game, the dealer noted.) Around three-quarters of the sculptures, which were made in an edition of five but are individually painted, had sold by Friday evening for between $12,000 and $15,000. Martinez was one who gained particular prominence during the speculative boom of 2013 and 2014 but has been able to maintain his presence, according to Taylor, because “he’s handled himself very well. He’s been very careful about what he’s released.”

The conservative market has also led dealers and collectors alike to comb back through art history to look for artists who have enduring relevance and touchpoints to major art-historical moments but haven’t yet fully made it into the market. “Our goal is to discover artists who have been overshadowed or forgotten in the same way that a young gallery looks to find a new emerging artist,” said Roxana Afshar of Waddington Custot. Late gallery founder Leslie Waddington’s collection was the talk of the start of Frieze Week when it achieved a white glove sale (or 100% sell-through rate) at Christie’s on Tuesday night.

At the fair, Waddington’s gallery, now run by Stephane Custot, was presenting a solo booth of work by Manolo Millares. His Composición con dimensión perdida (1956) sold on day one of the fair. “He’s an artist that we’ve been following and gathering work from for two years now,” said Afshar. “We just think he’s completely underrated, but we see that things are shifting slowly.” The market seems to agree, with a work from 1959 having sold at Christie’s in June for £842,500 (est. £300,000–400,000) and another, at double the low estimate, for £605,000 on Thursday night.

As the week began to wind down, Adrian Ghenie’s £7.1 million record-setting result for Nickelodeon (2008) at Christie’s on Thursday night was a hot topic of conversation—and another data point being put forward for the case of a market rebound. According to Ghenie’s gallerist Mihaela Lutea of Galeria Plan B, the result is perhaps not so surprising, given her estimation that Nickelodeon is among the artist’s three most iconic works, and the fact that the artist, who only ever produced a handful of works each year, has cut back even further on his production. At Frieze London, Lutea was particularly enthusiastic about the reception she had received for the paintings by new artist to the program Iulia Nistor, all three of which had sold for €4000–10,000, along with others back in Berlin. Two drawings on the stand by Achraf Touloub had been purchased by the Deutsche Bank Collection (clearly undeterred by worries last week that Germany might have to step in to bail it out amid a regulatory settlement in the U.S.) and a third went to a Chinese collection.

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Lutea’s take was that of most galleries I spoke with this week. “The times are difficult,” she said. “You have to invest a lot of money in the gallery and traveling. But you also need time to go and discover new artists.” She suggested, as had been a takeaway from Frieze London’s newest section The Nineties, that galleries need to be more rigorous in defining a model that works for their particular program and goals. To the extent that they haven’t yet accomplished that, it may explain some of the dissonance currently felt on the primary side. As market commentator Josh Baer put it particularly well, “Business here and [in] general is “normal”—neither fast and furious nor cowardly. ‘Normal’ just feels different.”

Part of that sentiment, I’d venture, is that the expectations built up over the past few years—whether of gallerists, artists, collectors, or fair directors—don’t quite work when things are “normal.” One hopes that the uncertainty clouding U.S. politics will soon wane, that a dose of reality will hit the rhetoric cleaving the U.K. from the continent, that the central banks can agree on measures to make our markets and underlying economic indicators better match up, and that this “different”-feeling “normal” can subside. In the art market, collectors returning to spend from their current respite would then find a more equally distributed—and frankly more interesting—group of artists leading the conversation. In the meantime, it’s a good occasion for the art world to sit back and make sure its structures and conventions are all currently to the benefit of the end goal here: facilitating the creation and propagation of culture.
—Alexander Forbes

A woman, supine, her face partially concealed by her pillow, stares intensely at the camera. Wearing little or no makeup, her hair is brushed back, unkempt. As this 12-minute film plays out, we see the woman, Joanne Salley, tell her story. She has been the victim of a scandal in the press, and she is concerned it portrays her unfavorably. This film by Simon Fujiwara, we are told, will redress this balance—and that it does. It follows her as she discusses her childhood, her personality, her weaknesses, and her brand. The hope is that we see her as an empowered, multifaceted personality, as she twirls in couture, rips up flowers, and films herself through her daily routine.

Within days of the initial publicity material appearing for Fujiwara’s “Joanne,” debuting October 7th at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, the battle Salley faces for a nuanced depiction in the public sphere was thrown into relief. “Joanne Salley sets pulses racing with shower trailer for film,” ran the headline in the Belfast Telegraph.

Such British tabloid-style journalism on Salley began several years ago, due to a scandal that erupted while she was teaching art at the elite Harrow School in north-west London, around a series of private photographs that students stole and distributed. Now Fujiwara, who was taught by Salley several years before the incident—and whose work often draws on biographical themes—hopes to depict a more complex truth about his former teacher, revealing the artificiality of her portrayal in the media. In doing so, he sheds light on themes including the multifaceted relationship between artist and mentor, one of the oldest and most profound pairings in artistic history.

The artist met Salley when he was a 17-year-old scholarship student. “My refuge was the art department,” he says. “Joanne arrived in my final year.” He adds that part of what drew him to her was that “she had come from a completely different system as well”—she had trained as a ballet dancer, and was a former beauty contest winner, which informed her art practice’s obsession with aesthetics, surface, and skin. “We connected,” he says. “I was one of these teenagers who wanted to explore his sexuality, and she was one person who’d had some life experiences that weren’t just ‘I’ve been to another boarding school.’ It was encouragement from a voice that I valued.”

The resultant work allows Salley the chance to recount her experiences of the aftermath of her scandal in her own words. In the film, Fujiwara and Salley are shown meeting professionals from public relations, advertising, and fashion companies as they seek to construct a new public image for her. Alongside the film, light boxes display fashion photographer Andreas Larsson’s pictures of Salley, which were taken as part of the project to rebuild her profile. While the show tackles public identity, female iconography, and Salley’s voice as an artist, the pair’s close working relationship—one in which the conventional power relationship has been overturned—no doubt aided their collaboration.

Necessarily, such teamwork between artists and teachers has a long, storied presence in art history, from Classical apprenticeships, to European academies of art, and the artist-teachers of the 19th century in Britain such as George Wallis, to this century, where there have been a plethora of successful artists spawned from successful teachers. In British art colleges, for example, there’s Michael Craig-Martin teaching at Goldsmiths, and Frank Martin at what is now Central St Martins School of Art and Design.

If we track back earlier in an artist’s career, the condition of arts education in the state school sector has been a common source of criticism in Britain, and is one of the reasons why Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s recent proposals for an “arts pupils premium”—extra funding for arts in state schools—was so popular. In a cash-strapped state education context, artistic mentoring might depend on class size. Harrow’s average is 13 students per class, under half the local average. There, at A-Level, when Salley and Fujiwara met, the student-teacher ratio was even better. Such conditions are perfect for artistic mentoring relationships to thrive.

“Harrow’s a boarding school, you’re with your teachers all the time,” says Fujiwara. “But it was more that the art that she had made herself was more interesting than what the other teachers had done.” He describes some of Salley’s work as resembling that of British painter Jenny Saville. “She introduced me to Cindy Sherman and the idea of taking on characters and roles. She was the most inspiring voice around me at the time.”

Fujiwara says his school’s all-boy environment meant an attractive woman appearing was a “gift,” though Salley tried hard to undermine her image as a “beauty queen” at the school. “She’s never really been the caricature of a beauty queen, she’s very active and very sporty,” he adds. “I know the male students in the art department respected her a lot and it was a very difficult position to get.”

While the show specifically tackles the reconstruction of Salley’s identity, it seems as though the seeds for its obsessions with beauty and the image might have been sewn when the pair first met. In that sense, it is as much about how artist-mentoring relationships provide inspiration, as it is about the pair’s longstanding friendship.

“I’ve always wanted to be an artist, so it was about having someone who was encouraging who could introduce me to other artists who I hadn’t discovered,” concludes Fujiwara. “To help me focus my interests. In that sense, all of my art teachers have been more mentors than technically teaching me. Everyone has one or two amazing teachers when they grow up and they are the people they remember forever. There’s always in that a feeling of connection.”

The white glove sale at Christie’s of 44 works from the personal collection of the respected art dealer Leslie Waddington on Tuesday set the pace for a successful week of contemporary sales in London. After a difficult summer consigning works against a backdrop of Brexit, a tumbling pound, and uncertainty over the impending U.S. presidential election, the auction houses approached the season with caution—in many cases offering works with enticingly low estimates.

For the most part, the move paid off. Specialists at Christie’s said that 80% of works in the Waddington auction sold above their estimates, something that had not been witnessed since the single-owner sale of another legendary art dealer, Ernst Beyeler. Bidders from 37 countries pushed the total well above the pre-sale estimate of £11.9–£18.5 million to fetch £28.3 million (all prices and totals include buyer’s premium).

Conservative estimates also lured bidders at the auction house’s contemporary evening sale two days later. Last October’s sale at Christie’s carried double the estimate of this year’s auction, but achieved a very similar result. “We were chasing unusual material during a difficult summer and we always felt we had to keep the estimatesattractive to galvanize bidding,” said Francis Outred, the house’s head of post-war and contemporary art, Europe. The auction flew above its estimate (£14.9 million–£21.8 million), making £34.3 million with fees, and sported a robust sell-through rate of 90%.

Adrian Ghenie, Nickelodeon, 2008. Image courtesy of Christie’s.

Rebuffing speculation that the bottom has dropped out of the market for young and emerging artists, two of the seven records at Christie’s were for artists under 40: Adrian Ghenie and Lucy McKenzie. Ghenie’s Nickelodeon (2008) sparked a bidding contest among at least six hopefuls, rising to almost five times its high estimate of £1.5 million to sell to a European buyer for £7.1 million, a new record for the artist. The Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac was an underbidder. Outred says the key with young artists is to keep the estimates attractive. “People have got tired of the estimates for some of the young and more fashionable names,” he says.

Speculation continues as to whether Brexit will harm or help the London trade, but the consensus is that foreigners were incentivized to bid at this week’s auctions as the pound slumped to a 31-year low. “If the Ghenie had sold last year for £7 million, it would have converted to $12 million; this year it was $9 million,” Outred points out. Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips all noted strong bidding from Asia, the U.S., and Europe.

Damien Hirst was one of the hits of the week; some in the trade have predicted that his market is poised for a comeback. Prices for the YBA’s works hit rock bottom during the recession, but the opening earlier this year of Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery in south London to display works from his collection appears to be boosting his own career.

Two Hirst canvases—one, Salvation (2003), covered in butterflies, the other, Damnation (2004), covered in flies—both doubled their estimates at Christie’s to sell for £665,000 and £485,000, respectively. The Los Angeles-based dealer and artist agent Stefan Simchowitz bought both works on behalf of a client. “Damien’s market has found its bottom as people have had the opportunity to collect him at more affordable prices, as it should be,” Simchowitz says. “It can now stabilize and regain its strength.” An early spot painting from 1992, painted by Hirst himself rather than one of his assistants, sold at Phillips on Wednesday for £509,000 (est. £300,000–500,000).

Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.

Further boosting market confidence, Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale also vaulted over its pre-sale estimate of £24.1–32.7 million to fetch £48 million with fees on Friday. The sell-through-rate was a strong 91%. The result was largely buoyed by a trio of high-flying paintings, including a garish oil stick and acrylic canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat that failed to sell at Sotheby’s in New York 11 months ago. Hannibal, painted in the artist’s golden year of 1982, was the most expensive work sold at auction this week, going to a telephone bidder for £10.6 million (est. £3.5–4.5 million). Dealers said the work was around 25% cheaper in sterling than it was six months ago.

The other two paintings to soar above estimate on the night were Peter Doig’s Grasshopper (1990), which sold on the telephone to Sotheby’s Asia-based specialist Jasmine Chen for £5.9 million (est. £2.8–3.5 million), and an early and unusual Gerhard Richter painting in two parts, Garten (1982), which went for £10.2 million (est. £3–4 million). Alex Branczik, head of contemporary art for Sotheby’s in Europe, says there are pocket of Richter’s oeuvre, such as works from the early 1980s, that are still undervalued. “Garten found the right level on the night,” he says.

Phillips was the only auction house to not surpass its upper pre-sale estimate. Its Wednesday sale mustered a decent total of £17.9 million (est. £14.2–20.5 million), with 94% sold by value. The result represents an almost 50% drop in value from last year’s sale. Phillips is known for specializing in emerging art, but the market for a type of quasi-minimalist abstract art—coined “zombie formalism” by the critic Walter Robinson—dried up towards the end of last year when prices, which had been astronomical in 2014, crashed back down to earth. The auction house has followed suit and artists such as Dan Colen and Lucien Smith have duly dropped off its books.

Photo courtesy of Phillips.

Indeed, there were few emerging artists in this week’s sale at Phillips. A 2004 work by Alex Israel was withdrawn prior to the auction, while a 2008 spray painting by Sterling Ruby was bought in at £340,000 (est £400,000–600,000). The top lot was Andy Warhol’s 20 Pink Mao’s (1979), which sold for £4.7 million (est £4–6 million). The work was one of four in the sale to be backed by an anonymous third party guarantee. “The froth that was in the market that was driving optimistic estimates has gone,” said Ed Dolman, the chief executive of Phillips.

Meanwhile, the Italian sales declined dramatically at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s this year. Christie’s had a tough act to follow after a record auction last October, when 90% of lots sold for £43.2 million including premium, the highest-ever total for an Italian sale and £7.6 million more than the post-war and contemporary evening sale the same night. This year’s 59-lot sale achieved a total of £18.7 million. The equivalent sale at Sotheby’s made £23.3 million (est £19.7–27.9 million).

All in all it was a reassuring week for the trade in London, with many noting the market is moving in the right direction. “The market is healthy and no longer overweight. It was back to business as usual under more normal conditions,” Simchowitz says.

—Anny Shaw

What It Takes to Recover a Stolen Work of Art

Artsy Editorial

By Leila Amineddoleh

Oct 8th, 2016 6:00 am

ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images

Last week’s highly publicized announcement that two stolen van Gogh paintings had been recovered after 14 years was a welcome surprise. Axel Rüger, director of Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, was ebullient in a statement, saying, “The paintings have been found! That I would be able to ever pronounce these words is something I had no longer dared to hope for.” He had reason to be joyous: According to the FBI, fewer than 10% of stolen works are estimated ever make it home safely. And while it may have seemed shocking that the works turned up during an Italian police raid on a Mafia-affiliated safehouse, this link to organized crime actually fits with who it is that steals art. Unlike Hollywood’s dramatic portrayals, art thefts are generally not commissioned by wealthy art patrons with a penchant for the finer things in life. Rather, art is stolen by people already involved in petty criminal enterprises or with organized syndicates such as the Mafia.

So how do thieves make off with a painting? And what should a victim do after realizing they’ve been robbed? Why are only a tiny percentage of works recovered?

Simple Theft, Difficult Sale

At its origins, art theft is primarily a crime of opportunity and simple burglary. To steal the two van Gogh paintings, a pair of thieves used a ladder to climb up to the roof of the Van Gogh Museum and broke into the building. The 1911 theft that rocketed the Mona Lisa (1503–19) to international fame involved a Louvre employee hiding in a closet overnight, then taking the painting off the wall when no one was around and walking out of the museum. In 1994, two thieves broke into the National Gallery in Oslo, nabbing Munch’s Scream (two different versions of which have been stolen.) An alarm that went off was ignored by a guard, and the grateful criminals left a note stating, “Thanks for the poor security.”

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After a theft, artworks typically enter the black market. But criminals looking to cash in will likely experience some difficulty. Generally under U.S. law, neither the thieves nor anyone they subsequently sell the work to can acquire good title. This means illicit owners can admire the piece in private, but they cannot truly own the work in the eyes of the law or sell it again in a legitimate marketplace since it remains perpetually vulnerable to seizure. In fact, even if the buyer of a stolen painting is acting in good faith, believing their transaction totally above board, authorities may seize ill-gotten property from thieves and unsuspecting purchasers.

The challenges associated with selling looted art can diminish the work’s value, to the point it drops so low that thieves abandon the piece. In some cases, the works are so famous that they become entirely impossible to sell at full value or on the open market. But this doesn’t prevent art from acting as a kind of currency within organized gangs. Indeed, one expert noted that the two recovered van Gogh paintings “were most likely used in what we call ‘art-napping’ — the Mafia often steals work of art and uses them as a kind of payment within their own families.” And despite publicity, a stolen work can find an unscrupulous or unknowing buyer.

What To Do after a Theft

When art is stolen, victims should first report the theft to law enforcement authorities, including local police and the FBI (if you’re American) which has an art crime team. By reporting the theft, international law enforcement agencies like Interpol can work to recover the object no matter where in the world the thief tries to sell it. Second, victims should report thefts to a stolen art database, such as Art Recovery Group’s database, Art Claim. Reputable private buyers, museums, and auction houses search stolen art databases when completing their due diligence before purchasing a work of art. If a piece appears on a registry such as Art Claim during this process, then the buyers are notified that it is stolen or has a disputed title. Buyers may refrain from purchasing the art, or in some cases, government authorities may be able to seize the property and return it to the rightful owner.

This happened in a recent case, in which I represented the rightful owners of a stolen 13th-century Italian painting by a follower of Duccio (although some believe it was by the master himself). The Madonna and Child was stolen in 1986 and went missing for over two and a half decades. Then, in early 2014, it appeared at Sotheby’s. The sale of the work was halted by the auction house after the Art Recovery Group matched the painting to an item on its database. The work was then pulled from the auction catalog, and federal authorities seized the panel and initiated a legal proceeding for its return. I represented the owners, filing an ownership claim such that my clients eventually succeeded in regaining their property. Reporting thefts and diligently seeking restitution often allows victims to more easily claim title to property in a lawsuit.

As is typical in stolen property matters, looted items sometimes disappear as time passes. The trail goes cold as thieves and black market buyers lay low, hoping that the crime is simply forgotten and that they might resell the work once that happens. And indeed, it can be more difficult to prosecute art thefts as the years tick on, as witnesses may pass away and evidence of the crime is lost. This is why reporting a theft is so important: It prevents works from ever being sold on the legitimate market (such as at a major auction house or gallery) by creating a record of the theft that follows the art.

The Risks and Rewards of Going Public

Hard work and perseverance are often required for the lengthy hunt that can follow a theft. A well-known restitution case involved 6th-century Cypriot mosaics. The rightful owners were the Autocephalous Greek-Orthodox Church of Cyprus and the Republic of Cyprus. The nation was able to recover the looted mosaics from an American dealer, Peg Goldberg, in 1990 because it contacted numerous international cultural heritage organizations and informed museums, auction houses, universities, and research institutions about the missing pieces. Well-known Cypriot antiquities experts also disseminated information about the mosaics to their colleagues and scholars throughout the world. In addition, the Embassy of Cyprus in Washington, D.C., distributed press releases and information to journalists, Members of Congress, legislative assistants, and heritage professionals. As a result, the Republic of Cyprus located the mosaics when Goldberg tried to sell the works to some of the same people who knew they were missing. After a legal process, they were eventually returned.

Sadly, the number of successful restitutions is low because there are many challenges facing rightful owners—some even created by the very attempts to recover the work. Some victims broadcast the theft more publicly, hoping that a subsequent owner may return the stolen goods. But publicizing a theft can cause the value of stolen works to plummet to zero or cause a sale to carry too many risks. In such instances where profit is impossible, the thieves and their associates may choose to dispose of the evidence by destroying the works (though that is a rare occurrence). In the case of prolific art thief Stéphane Breitwieser, his mother destroyed paintings by old masters including Lucas Cranach the Elder, Pieter Brueghel the Younger and other artists by cutting them up and forcing them down a garbage disposal. She threw other art objects into a river. The mother of one of the gang members involved in the Kunsthal Rotterdam theft of 2012 also destroyed evidence—she incinerated the stolen paintings from the museum. This didn’t prevent some of the criminals involved with the thefts from being caught, however.

Facing all these challenges, recovering a work can sometimes be a badge of honor. The publicity surrounding international restitution cases can even cause the piece in question to rise in notability and potentially even in price. The Mona Lisa, although valuable before the theft, became the most famous painting in the world only after it was snatched. But when a work is stolen from a museum, it is the public who benefits from a recovery. After criminal proceedings end, the recovered van Gogh paintings will go back on view (hopefully with a little better security) for all to see and enjoy.

—Leila Amineddoleh

Today’s Young Dealers Could Learn a Lot from the ’90s

Artsy Editorial

By Molly Gottschalk

Oct 7th, 2016 1:55 pm

Wolfgang Tillmans with his work at Buchholz & Buchholz, The Nineties, Frieze London, 2016. Photograph by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

Whispers have turned to shouts around the doom and gloom of the art market following a period of rife speculation. Galleries are closing their doors; others contemplate calling it quits. Artist prices are plummeting. Buyers from emerging markets are disappearing from auction salerooms.

This situation could be a dramatized snapshot of 2016—but the year is actually 1991. The bubble of the late ’80s has burst; the art market is reeling. But, in the midst of this chaos, a group of dealers who now dominate the discourse around contemporary art are getting their start. “The ’90s was the decade which really created the environment we find ourselves in now,” said Jo Stella-Sawicka, artistic director of Frieze, which launched a new section this week, The Nineties, recreating 11 seminal exhibitions from this era under the curation of Nicolas Trembley.

The 20 Best Booths at Frieze London

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“We had no money at the time. Young people keep asking if this was my office—no, it was my gallery,” laughed Daniel Buchholz in the 3-by-3-meter gallery space he’s recreated for Wolfgang Tillmans’s first-ever solo in 1993. At Frieze, some 70 photographs and magazine spreads are scattered across the walls of a replica of the tiny space behind Buchholz’s father’s Cologne bookshop where the show was originally mounted. For the now hugely influential German dealer, who keeps galleries in Cologne, Berlin, and New York, it’s a reminder of an era when fewer funds meant fewer expectations. “It’s good to remember that it’s not necessary to have a $20,000 production,” he said. (Though he noted this install wasn’t cheap.) “It’s not always about the money.” In its original installation the photographs sold for £200 a pop. As of Thursday afternoon, the photographs at the fair, now on offer as a single work (Buchholz & Buchholz Installation), were on reserve with a German museum.

Installation view of work by Pierre Joseph at Air de Paris’s booth, The Nineties, Frieze London, 2016. Photograph by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/Frieze.

“There was certainly a different type of relationship between artists and galleries at the time,” said Florence Bonnefous, founder of Air de Paris, who noted that galleries didn’t need to put the same pressure on artists to make the right number of works—or the right type of works—for art fairs. Perhaps in a nod backward for the French gallerist, her presentation at Frieze is not so much monetarily driven: two of the three “living sculpture” works on view by Pierre Joseph had sold in the ’90s. (Characters portrayed by actors in the booth include a policeman, a leper, and a Cinderella.) “It allowed some kind of liberty,” Bonnefous continued. “We didn’t have much but we didn’t need much. It was not about making big objects that are very expensive to produce, it was about producing ideas.”

In this spirit, Bonnefous recalls the gallery’s first show in 1990, “Les Ateliers du Paradise,” where Philippe Perrin, Philippe Parreno, and Pierre Joseph turned a summer holiday into a month-long live-in exhibition, with chefs, artists, and writers passing in and out—now considered a key moment in the start of relational aesthetics. “The gallery was open when we didn’t want to go for a swim at the beach,” she recalled. “But we could also go swim for a couple of hours.”

There were of course two schools of thought here, as alongside the gallerists carving out their programs, New York’s mega-dealers began to build up stables and commercial brands marked by high production costs and the emergence of art-world stars, YBADamien Hirst being the poster child. But Frieze, a fair famed for its support of artists and gallerists, appears to have focused its gaze for The Nineties on the former.

With the route to market for work not always so pronounced, when collectors did buy, they bought with passion, not speculation. “There was never a question of price and value, is the price going to double soon—auctions didn’t play a role at all,” said Mehdi Chouakri, standing amongst 14 ’80s–’90s-era television sets broadcasting aerobic lessons by Cindy Crawford, Jane Fonda, and Raquel Welch. The work, A Journey to Fitness or How to Lose 30 Pounds In Under Three Weeks (1993), restages Sylvie Fleury’s pioneering installation from Aperto ’93 at the Venice Biennale and sold on Thursday to a European collection. It sits within the artist’s wall painting, Modulateur Ombres et Lumières, Welcome to the World of Chanel Beauty (1993), which sees three hues of Chanel makeup cover the booth’s respective walls. This sounds eerily similar to the trend we’re seeing amid today’s softened art market: Across Frieze, dealers have reported that when people are buying, they are spending more time researching and contemplating the artists they want to support.

According to Chouakri, the more thoughtful pace seen amongst collectors was also a tenet of the era’s artistic production. “A young artist of the ’90s was perhaps older than 30, while a young artist nowadays is 23 or 24,” he said, noting that Pierre Huyghe and Parreno, while both extremely active in the ’90s, took some 20 years to reach the success they’ve seen today. The dealer attributes this rhythm to the early stages of the Information Age—with limited access to email and internet—when a letter between the United States and Europe would easily take a week and FedEx was still on the rise. “Even within the velocity in our time, sometimes stepping back and thinking, being more careful in doing things is in fact much better whether you are an artist or a gallery,” he said.

In 2016, it’s hard to imagine a gallery or artist possibly surviving without email. (Even Buchholz, who famously writes all communication by hand, still has his assistant type up his notes and hit send.) The quickened pace of commerce afforded to galleries by technology and globalization allows more to thrive—and more artists to show. But considering the similarities of our current times to those of the groundbreaking era The Nineties encapsulates, it’s instructive to dig deeper about what may be more easily applied.

How could young galleries today find themselves in the shoes of dealers like Esther Schipper, who some two decades after mounting Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s solo exhibition R.W.F. in 1993 (an apartment-turned-film set which is restaged at Frieze) ushered her roster to stardom? (This week in London sees no fewer than five of her artists open major exhibitions: Roman Ondák at South London Gallery; Martin Creed, Ugo Rondinone, and Gonzalez-Foerster at the Hayward Gallery; Philippe Parreno at the Tate’s Turbine Hall.) These dealers emerged during a difficult market, and amid social and political upheaval—the AIDS crisis and the Gulf War playing no small part. But our decade has its own set of issues. What could we do to be able to look back in 25 years time and recall the 2010s as the time when art once again took a new and groundbreaking tack?

Ultimately, it seems clear that galleries are in need of greater opportunities to define what works for their own businesses in regards to output, programming, and fair participation. “I’m not sure [today’s] young galleries know much about this time, because they’ve started out with a series of constraints and rules which are so firm,” Bonnefous said. We’re just starting to see these rules be broken: Last year, younger galleries diverted from FIAC initiated Paris Internationale; others, rumored to have been displeased with their performance at Frieze and other fairs began the online-only Dream art fair, put forth as a free-of-charge platform for small, young galleries unable to afford the hefty overhead of the top-tier fair circuit. Looking at The Nineties, it’s clear that there are benefits for galleries being allowed to chart their own path, whatever that means for each individual gallery.

“It’s just about what you stand for,” said Chouakri. “Quality and good work is the most important thing—and not speed, money, value.” This, he said, is what we learned from the artists of the late ’80s and the ’90s, like the Guerrilla Girls or Fleury. “You stand for your passion. It’s your life. And you’ve got to be able to do it over years and years and years. And the ’90s were for that.”

The 14th edition of Frieze London and fifth outing of Frieze Masters opened in an uncomfortable economic environment — a situation made stark by the coinciding turmoil surrounding the fairs’ lead sponsor, Deutsche Bank. While the mood was yet upbeat at the busy VIP openings on October 5, the optimistic thirst for cutting-edge contemporary works has given way to a more sober environment.

New this year at Frieze London is a minimal and largely conceptual section dedicated to works from the 1990s. Not so long ago, perhaps, but the new focus contributes to a different, gentler feel in a tent that previously stipulated that works had to be made after 2000.

Other works from the 1990s feature in the main sections of the fairs. “People now want to look back a bit,” says Wendy Olsoff, the co-founder of New York’s PPOW gallery. At the Frieze London opening, crowds were circling around a striking table of pink plastic goods by the feminist artist Portia Munson on the PPOW booth (“Pink Project: Table”, 1994, $225,000). Early sales at the fair included some of Munson’s accompanying photographs ($15,000 each, edition of six). Newer works also sold on the first day, including a 2016 painting by one of this year’s hot names, Harold Ancart, for $85,000 (David Kordansky gallery).

The Frieze fairs are open until Sunday evening.

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A buyer quickly emerged for Zak Ové’s impressive site-specific courtyard installation made for the third edition of the 1:54 African art fair in London’s Somerset House this week (“Black and Blue: The Invisible Man and The Masque of Blackness”, 2016). Modern Forms, a contemporary art platform founded by Hussam Otaibi, managing partner of the investment group Floreat, and Nick Hackworth, the curator who previously ran London’s Paradise Row gallery, bought one of three editions of the 40 identical, life-size sculptures of Nubian masked men, priced at £300,000, through London’s Vigo gallery. The plan is for Ové’s installation to be part of a sculpture park that Modern Forms is creating at a property in Berkshire. Modern Forms was founded this year and draws on Otaibi’s 500-plus collection of mostly emerging art. Floreat is also sponsoring the fair (open until Sunday).

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The modern and contemporary art dealer Pilar Ordovas has proved that art fairs are not the only way to succeed in today’s market. She instead focuses much of her creative energy on mounting three high-quality exhibitions a year in her London space, while dealing privately. Now Ordovas has decided to commit to an additional exhibition a year in New York, having tested the waters with an Eduardo Chillida exhibition last year. Rather than open a dedicated space stateside, Ordovas plans to choose a different venue for each show. “We are the opposite of a supermarket for art, one space doesn’t fit all,” she says. The first formal pop-up is in a townhouse on the Upper East Side, near the Mark Hotel, for which she is taking the Artists and Lovers exhibition currently on show in London. She opens in New York on November 7 (until January 7).

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The Fine Art Group, previously known as the Fine Art Fund Group, has become the latest business to launch an art loans operation. Founder and chief executive Philip Hoffman says that the rebrand reflects the firm’s broader offering, including the seven investment funds that he continues to manage. The group has also been running an art advisory service for the past few years. The new art lending business is headed by Freya Stewart, who has worked as a finance lawyer, and as senior legal counsel at Christie’s. Stewart says she expects to offer relatively low rates — and a loan-to-value level of up to 50 per cent, which is high for the art market — because the group will be using its own invested equity capital, and because it already has an in-house team of art experts. She expects to lend against works valued between $250,000 and $20m.

Hoffman would not comment on the individual performance of his funds (two of which provide third-party guarantees to auction houses), but says that his company has been involved in transactions worth $325m at Christie’s and Sotheby’s over the past two years.

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The Frieze Week auctions opened in style at Christie’s on October 4 with the sale of works owned by the respected art dealer Leslie Waddington, who died last year. The 44 works all sold — a so-called “White Glove” auction — for a total £23.8m hammer (£28.3m with premium), comfortably ahead of their presale upper estimate of £18.6m.

The sale’s success shows the marked difference between selling a single collection that has been amassed over a lifetime versus the hurried, seasonal gathering of available material. Waddington bought many of the works directly from the artists (including Peter Blake, Michael Craig-Martin and Patrick Caulfield) or their foundations; only two works had been on an auction block before. Several works sold above mostly attractive estimates, including Francis Picabia’s “Lampe” (c1923), which went to a telephone bidder for £3.1m (£3.6m with fees, est £800,000-£1.5m).

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It was a rather more hurried auction at Phillips the following night. With two works withdrawn (by Robert Longo and Alex Israel), the 28-lot sale felt thin but managed to squeeze within its revised £14.2m-£20.5m estimate to make a total £15m (£17.9m with fees). High points deservedly included Mark Bradford’s “Rat Catcher of Hamelin III” (2011), which sold for £3.2m (£3.7m with fees, against an estimate of £1.5m-£2m).

Christie’s and Sotheby’s contemporary auctions and Italian sales were still to come as this column went to press.

Photograph: Victor Jules Raison

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At Frieze Art Week, All Eyes on the Pound

By SCOTT REYBURNOCT. 7, 2016

NYTIMES

“Nickelodeon” by Adrian Ghenie sold for 7.1 million pounds, or about $9 million. Credit Hannah McKay/European Pressphoto Agency

“Great price, great picture!” exclaimed the auctioneer Jussi Pylkkanen, under a screen that showed “GBP 6,200,000” above conversions into a range of currencies that had strengthened against the pound in the last few months — and days.

Mr. Pylkkanen, the global president of Christie’s, had just sold the star lot of his auction house’s Thursday night “Frieze Week” sale of contemporary art. Adrian Ghenie’s almost 14-foot-wide canvas of an octet of sinister figures in an interior, titled “Nickelodeon” and dating from 2008, was pushed by at least six bidders to a final fee-inclusive 7.1 million pounds, or about $9 million. The price, given by an anonymous telephone bidder, was seven times the low estimate and a new salesroom high for Mr. Ghenie, a 39-year-old Romanian artist.

What might be called the “Brexit Discount” was the talk of Frieze Week, the logjam of fairs, auctions and gallery shows clustered around the contemporary Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park. (On Tuesday, the pound slumped to a 31-year low of $1.27; on Friday it momentarily fell as low as $1.20.) Christie’s kick-started the week’s auctions on Tuesday with its £28.3 million sale of the private collection of the renowned London gallerist Leslie Waddington, who died in November. All 44 lots sold.

“It’s a dollar market. It has to have an effect,” Mr. Pylkkanen said on Thursday after Christie’s deftly curated sale of 41 lots raised £34.3 million, or $43.5 million, with 90 percent of the works sold. The total at the company’s equivalent sale last year was £35.6 million, which was then $55 million.

This year, because of a lack of growth in major economies and the volatility of geopolitical events, international collectors have been more cautious at auctions and fairs. But the weakness of the pound gave a boost to Frieze Week— certainly at Christie’s, where bidders hailed from more than 35 countries.
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Stefan Simchowitz, a collector and adviser based in Los Angeles, was an active bidder, buying about a dozen big-ticket lots for clients over the two evenings of Christie’s sales. These included a 2003 Thomas Schutte sculpture, “Bronzefrau Nr. 13,” which he purchased on Thursday for £3.7 million.

“The pound is certainly attractive in these sales to collectors. 100 percent,” Mr. Simchowitz said in an email.

Christie’s was careful to pack its Thursday night sale with fresh works by artists who are now in demand with collectors. The American figurative painter Henry Taylor, for example, is currently the subject of a sold-out exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe. Mr. Taylor’s 2008 painting “Walking With Vito,” showing two boys walking a dog, was a timely offering at Christie’s. Four bidders pushed the price to £137,000. Gallery prices for paintings at Blum & Poe range from $25,000 to about $100,000.

It had been a rather different story the previous evening at Phillips’s sale of 20th-century and contemporary art, which was weighted with familiar names that have been heavily traded — and speculated — over the last decade. The slender 28-lot auction raised only £17.9 million with fees, 43 percent down on the £31.5 million Phillips achieved at its equivalent London sale last October.

Only two lots sold for hammer prices above their high estimates. Most prominent of these was the large 2011 word-splattered abstract “Rat Catcher of Hamelin III” by Mark Bradford, who will be representing the United States at next year’s Venice Biennale. With a high estimate of £2 million, it was bought by the London dealer Inigo Philbrick for £3.7 million with fees.

Works by reputed contemporary artists whose markets have not been “burned” by speculation was the commodity most in demand at the Wednesday preview of the 14th annual Frieze Art Fair, the centerpiece of Frieze Week.

“It’s the one week of the year in which you get the chance to take the pulse of the whole market,” said Wendy Cromwell, an art adviser based in New York. According to Ms. Cromwell, Frieze, which this year featured 166 international gallerists, has “fallen off the map” for many American collectors, in spite of the falling pound.
Photo
Josef Albers, study for “Homage to the Square.” Credit 2016 the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, via Christie’s Images Ltd. 2016

“I’ve seen a bunch of advisers, but not many collectors,” she said. “The fair has lost its buzzy edge. It’s now a commercial entity, but it still affords opportunities to buy exciting work,” she added, after buying one of two new triangular paintings on linen by the British artist Chris Ofili, priced at $380,000, at the Frieze booth of David Zwirner.

The New York dealer David Lewis was among 37 “emerging” galleries in the main Frieze fair’s “Focus” section. Underlining the fair’s commercial maturity, Mr. Lewis was showing nine new abstract paintings and a sculpture by Lucy Dodd, 34, an artist based in New York State, who this year had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The works ranged in price from $7,000 to $60,000, and all had been sold or on reserve by the end of Wednesday.

Frieze’s sister fair, Frieze Masters, whose fifth edition previewed on Wednesday, remains an enigmatic event. Supremely elegant in design and pleasant to visit, the fair is dominated by fully-priced modern and postwar art, with a shrinking representation of historic material to appeal to “crossover” buyers. Data quantifying whether the fair works commercially for dealers remains fragmentary.

It is a sign of these post-boom times that arguably the commercially “hottest” artist of the moment isn’t a 20- or 30-something in New York or Los Angeles, but the German-born American Josef Albers (1888-1976). The market for his work has been transformed since May, when the New York mega-gallerist David Zwirner took over representation of his estate. Zwirner, who will have solo Albers shows in New York in November and in London in January, sold a gray 30-inch “Homage to the Square” from 1964 to an American collector for $1 million at the preview of Frieze Masters.

The previous evening at Christie’s Waddington auction, Mr. Simchowitz, the Los Angeles-based adviser, had to pay £665,000 each, or about $849,000, for two 16-inch “Homage” paintings, respectively graded in shades of red and orange-to-burgundy and dated 1969 and 1973. Last year, Albers’s 16-inch abstracts were selling for $150,000 to $250,000 at auction.

The London dealer Dickinson was showing a small-scale 1949 version of René Magritte’s painting “L’Empire des Lumières” (The Dominion of Light) at a spectacular booth devoted to Surrealism. Formerly owned by Nelson A. Rockefeller, the Magritte was one of 17 oil versions of the subject and had been consigned for sale by another American private collector with a Rockefeller-size asking price of $25 million. The “Surrealist Revolution” display offered 50 works, starting at $35,000 for an Yves Tanguy ink drawing.

As of Friday morning, the gallery had not reported any confirmed sales.

“Healthy, robust, contracting, healthy, robust and contracting like a lung that breathes in and then out,” said Mr. Simchowitz, describing the current state of the art market. “Sometimes it has oxygen and sometimes not.”

Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967, which opened in Chelsea at Hauser & Wirth last week, offers a rare, comprehensive peek into one decade in an artist’s process and career.

Curator Paul Schimmel has organized an exhibition of 36 paintings and 53 drawings culled from museums (two from the Museum of Modern Art), a gallery and private collections. The paintings fill all but one of the rooms and feature thick oil or gouache brushstrokes in progressively dim colors that form indeterminate shapes. Guston finally abandoned these types of paintings for the “pure drawings” that hang on the wall of the final room.

Guston’s career progressed from figuration to abstraction and back again. The exhibition’s paintings, as a group, tilt heavily toward abstraction, though murky forms emerge upon close examination. At a preview, Schimmel identified heads, targets, and what could be a paintbrush. “The creation of these forms is really the subject of this entire exhibition,” he said. Guston was concerned with the “loss of the object” in the abstraction that many of his peers were practicing at the time.

“This has been described to me as the transition era,” Schimmel said about the ten years the exhibition explores. It doesn’t really make sense though, he pointed out, that you would describe ten years in a master’s life that way.

“He had an ability to push back on his own history,” said Schimmel. “Push back on his own success. Push back on both the critical and commercial success that he achieved remarkably in the 50s.” It’s a lesson that young artists of any medium can appreciate: continue to challenge yourself, avoid complacency and refuse to allow external praise to guide your career. When Guston eventually left behind his version of abstraction for figurative works that often invoked social issues, many critics were initially appalled. Yet, those works may now be his strongest legacy.

Schimmel spoke about the paintings’ titles as evidence of Guston’s approach to painting as a journey—Traveler III, Turn, Reverse, Path II, Path IV, Alchemist. The names offer small hints for viewers, friendly clues into material that can seem initially unapproachable.

Schimmel also emphasized Guston’s creative challenges. “The word ‘free’ is something that Guston often wrestled with,” he said. “Free was a blank canvas but was ultimately an enormous constraint.” He spoke of Guston’s sense of “unfreedom” as “the freedom of being able to reject and embrace the past. In the beginning, you’re free. When you face the white canvas, you’re free, and it’s the most anguishing state.” It’s a relatable feeling–the simultaneous sense of possibility and fear upon starting a new project, taking all your predecessors into account while attempting to begin something unique and meaningful.

‘I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself. And I think the best painting that’s done here is when he paints himself, and by himself I mean himself in this environment, in this total situation.’
– Philip Guston, 1960

New York… Beginning 26 April 2016, Hauser & Wirth will present ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’, exploring a pivotal decade in the career of the preeminent 20th century American artist. Featuring 36 paintings and 53 drawings, many on loan from major museums and private collections, the exhibition draws together a compelling body of work that reveals the artist grappling to reconcile gestural and field painting, figuration and abstraction. Calling attention to a series of works that have not yet been fully appreciated for their true significance in the artist’s development, ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’ explores a decade in which Guston confronted aesthetic concerns of the New York School, questioning modes of image making and what it means to paint abstractly. In the number and quality of paintings on view from this period, the show parallels Guston’s important 1966 survey at the Jewish Museum in New York, a half century ago. As its title suggests, the exhibition offers an intimate look at Guston’s unique relationship to painting and the process by which his work evolved.

On view through 29 July 2016, ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’ has been organized by Paul Schimmel, Partner and Vice President of Hauser & Wirth. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive, fully illustrated catalogue focusing specifically on the period beginning in the late 1950s and spanning a decade until the artist’s return to figuration in the late 1960s.

About the Exhibition

By the mid-1950s, Philip Guston (1913 – 1980) and his contemporaries Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Clyfford Still, were among the leading figures of the New York School, standing at the forefront of American avant-garde painting. Guston, whose work was widely exhibited during this period, achieved critical success as an abstract painter, whose work was lauded its luminous, ethereal, and tactile fields of bold gesture and color. At this pinnacle moment, with the artist seemingly at the height of his career, an unexpected shift occurred in Guston’s approach. Dark, ominous forms began to crowd his paintings, coalescing into what would become a new language that consumed his practice over the next ten years.

The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth opens with ‘Fable II’ and ‘Rite’, two small paintings from 1957 that suggest evolution in both Guston’s mood and technique. Disturbing the pictorial field of these canvases, thick, densely clustered black strokes burst through heavily pigmented colorful patches ranging in tone from radiant azure and blazing orange, to fleshy pink and deep forest green. Similarly, a silvery wash of glimmering brushstrokes begins to encroach upon Guston’s lighter forms. Enveloping the background completely in ‘Last Piece’ (1958), the expanses of grey field suggest erasure – an obliteration of the artist’s previous association to pure abstraction.

In that same year of 1958, Guston exclaimed, ‘I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart’. In the face of abstraction, Guston’s search for corporeality intensified. He challenged himself to create and simultaneously dissolve the dialogues of the New York School in a field that evoked ‘something living’ on the surface of his canvas. The introduction of brooding forms can now be understood as harbingers of a new figuration, wherein titles such as ‘Painter’ (1959) go so far as to suggest the pictorial presence of Guston, the painter himself. Wrestling with the simultaneous existence of abstraction and representation, ‘Painter’ strikes a precarious note: ambiguous, but semi-recognizable forms recall the artist’s early figurative works of the 1940s. A red shape and the loose application of blue paint hint at the return of his signature hooded figure, here with a paintbrush in hand. At the same time, however, the artist’s gestures dissolve legible shapes into a swirling field of energies in flux.

The exhibition continues across four dedicated rooms, tracing the evolution of Guston’s forms through the 1960s until they are reduced to “the isolation of the single image”. With such works as ‘Path II’ (1960) and ‘Alchemist’ (1960), dense pictorial dramas are unleashed, with colors and forms competing against one another in a storm of darkened strokes. In ‘Path IV’ (1961), Guston’s blackened, weighted masses emerge victorious, swarming in an atmosphere of rusted reds and ashen greys. Meanwhile, ‘Accord I’ (1962) reconciles the grouping of Guston’s black forms while still offering richness and warmth, as faint hues of color peek through pewter grey grounds.

Such concessions disappear in the following year: In a significant group of works created between 1963 and 1965, Guston interacts directly with the raw surface of his canvas, marking gestural, smoky fields in greys and pinks. One of the largest paintings from this period, ‘The Year’ (1964) is dominated by the presence of two great black personages floating in a field of luscious wet-on-wet strokes. Using white pigment to erase his looming black strokes, Guston creates heaving washes of nuanced grey matter that seem to pulsate with energy and life. As forms become fewer and denser in other works, the artist’s titles imply vague narratives. In ‘Group II’ (1964) or ‘The Three’ (1964), head-like shapes and bodies emerge. In the latter, Guston represents a family: the artist, his daughter, and his wife. The culmination of this extraordinary series is ‘Position I’ (1965), in which a single black shape nestles in a barren landscape devoid of chromatic variation.

In the years following his 1966 Jewish Museum survey, Guston would abandon painting and turn to drawing during a time of internal conflict and personal turmoil. In the two-year span between 1966 and 1967, he produced hundreds of works on paper in charcoal and brush-and-ink that are known as his ‘pure’ drawings. Works from this period occupy the final room of the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. Presented together in a grid, they recall the manner in which Guston lived with these works, which were tacked to his studio walls.

Commenting upon the decade explored in ‘Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967’ Paul Schimmel said, ‘If there was one way in which Guston was consistent as an artist, it was in his unwillingness to be pinned down or to rest on his own considerable accomplishments and influence. As one of the most significant proponents in the reconciliation of gestural and field painting, figuration and abstraction, he was a solitary figure, ‘moving vertically’, unencumbered by the responsibilities and pressures that others often felt as they worked in his shadow’.

How Philip Guston, America’s Great Painter of the Night, Completely Reinvented the Sublime

As late as he came to the style, by 1957 Philip Guston was a highly admired first-generation Abstract Expressionist — a phrase he hated. How “late” was Guston? In the 1940s peers like Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko were finding their ways into all-over abstraction. Yet Guston experimented with figures, grounds, solid spaces, and objects until 1950. Pollock — whom Guston went to high school with in Los Angeles (the two were expelled for designing satirical leaflets) and who urged Guston to move to New York in 1935 — had been making abstract paintings since 1939. Gorky had done so since 1932; Rothko and Willem de Kooning reached these further shores by the early 1940s. Guston didn’t go fully abstract until about 1950! History is lucky; had he waited a minute more the Ab Ex train would have left without him and we might never have heard of him.

Guston was always a hesitant plodder, and when he finally did get to real abstraction he stayed ambivalent about it. “Every real painter wants to be, and his greatest desire is to be, a realist,” he said. The abstract works that deservedly won him fame are beautiful shimmering lyrical fields of broken brush strokes, flickering grounds of pearly blue and pink, serene combinations of Monet and Turner with inflections of Mondrian’s early piers-reflected-in-water. But Guston started to feel as if he was only taking small bites. By the 1950s, he felt he “had nowhere to go.” Saying “I hope sometime to get to the point where I’ll have the courage to paint my face … to paint a single form in the middle of the canvas,” he started doing exactly that. And had the courage to do it at the apex of his career.

By 1970 he’d finished “clearing the decks.” From then until his death, in 1980, at 66,* Guston left abstraction behind and made some of the most memorable and influential paintings of the late 20th century, big and small: huge, gloppy, opaque-colored images of Ku Klux Klansmen driving around in convertibles, smoking cigars; cyclopes heads, in bed, staring at bare lightbulbs; piles of legs and shoes; figures hiding under blankets, clutching paintbrushes in bed. A lot of these are so narratively accessible they can seem almost comic-strip-like. But also cryptic. I see spiders, newts, malignant clouds, boatmen, snake charmers, lanterns lighting up existential nights. The list of artists influenced by this incredible work includes Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, Albert Oehlen, Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Murray, and Georg Baselitz, who saw as early as 1959 that Guston was involved with “a distortion of the abstract … full of concrete forms.” Jasper Johns saw that, too.

But the stakes of abandoning abstraction were high. Recognition had come late to Guston’s generation. The Abstract Expressionists had labored alone in America, dirt poor, with no audience, no art-world apparatus to support them. Only one another. As Barnett Newman famously put it, “We were making it out of ourselves.” And those selves were obsessed with going beyond Picasso and into non-objective painting. They had bet their entire lives on the gamble, which is why any sign of apostasy or disaffection was seen as a threat to all. Even after America took notice of the group, in the early 1950s, they were the constant butt of jokes about “my 3-year-old” being able to paint like that. Worse yet, no sooner had they arrived then a new group of artists — led by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg — arrived on the stage doing totally antithetical work. The world turned on a dime. In 1962, the Sidney Janis Gallery organized a show including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, and Claes Oldenburg. This was seen as a betrayal by Guston, Robert Motherwell, Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb, who all quit the gallery in protest. It was the show in which de Kooning reportedly told Warhol he was “a killer of art.” But Guston wasn’t really in line with his colleagues; amidst all this he harbored secret feelings of wanting to change.

By 1957, he’d done everything he could do to avoid doing what he had to do, and his work began to solidify into something new. The lesson of his career is that in order to really be themselves all artists must find their inner Guston: an artist who foregoes easy answers, looks for and channels doubt and not knowing. An artist like this understands that he or she isn’t controlling their art — not really; that on some cosmic level art controls the artist. All great artists must be able to create a machine that can make things that they cannot predict. Even when they make what might be nightmarish or ugly to them.

Philip Guston, Position I, 1965. Photo: Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth

Which is why “Philip Guston; Painter 1957–1967,” at Hauser & Wirth, a showcase of Guston at the turning point of his career, is an incantatory lesson for all artists. Perfectly curated by the gallery’s Paul Schimmel, the exhibition sounds a secret chord for artists in search of one of art’s many strange grails: how to make art that is original and entirely one’s own. This is especially pressing now that there are promising signs of artists everywhere trying to break through the fog of professionalism and careerism that have crept into the art world; the corporate carefulness that’s made too many painters make little moves in known directions; toe pre-approved formal lines; and make the system feel clogged up, static, sterile. Guston, who was desperate to change, knew this. He said “I got sick and tired of all that purity… the extreme codification of beliefs and the institutionalism of everything.” If that sounds painfully familiar, make it your business to see this show.

On view in the airplane-hangar-scaled museum-level gallery show are 35 paintings and 48 drawings. All are from this lesser-known decade of his career, 1957 to 1967. The entire group has not been exhibited together since the 1960s. So this is new information for many in the art world. What we see is a lead-up to what is perhaps the greatest last-act in 20th-century American art history: Guston’s all-hell-broken-loose id-under-pressure late figurative paintings.

The change comes slowly at first; Guston is always fighting it. As Jasper Johns put it about being an artist, “If you avoid everything you can avoid, then you do what you can’t avoid doing, and you do what is helpless, and unavoidable.” Guston did that. The opening gallery shows his first steps — so small you might not see them, thinking, Oh, he’s getting choppier, is all. I guess that triangle could be a hood or something. In 1957, Guston’s colors turn more opaque; warm tones turn frosty and muddy; odd, armlike shapes appear, torsos or trunks, hillocks, shadowy head configurations. But nothing definite. Being figurative was so strictly verboten that at one point Guston said he painted a can with paintbrushes in it, lost his nerve and scraped it off. It was just too much. In the next gallery, Guston’s backgrounds turn blocky. The shimmery thing is gone. So are the little snaky strokes. Things are thickening. A huge maroon hand thing emerges from the top of one canvas. Compositions get optically bolder. In Garden of M, named after his wife and daughter (both named Musa), we spot something like a patchy garden grid, or maybe two lumpy figures clutching each other in bed. Sooty grays, yellows, and crimsons abound. But things stay abstract. What’s happening is that Guston is looking for every way possible not to make a figurative painting. He couldn’t just paint that single thing inside a canvas, a head, or even a can, without retreating back into abstraction. It must have been hellish. These works are almost ugly.

Then, in 1963, he just blows through the fear. A big, black-hat-wearing, egg-shaped head appears with a shaky arm holding what might be a paintbrush and maybe a small canvas. This wasn’t Ab Ex, it wasn’t Pop, it wasn’t like anything. The title Painter III tells us what’s going on; it’s a self-portrait and a collective portrait of all artists’ immense inner temperaments when venturing into realms unknown. But it’s too much for Guston and he pulls back. Again. Looking is just a smooshed figure that might be gazing at a black rectangle. It’s almost self-as-grub. This one-step-forward, one-step-back crab dance continues as Guston looks for biomorphic, architectural, or geometric solutions rather than what’s staring him in the face: the horror of going both figurative and expressionistic. In the last work in the show, Guston hits the wall of all the implied image-making. An all-gray field that is so confusing to Guston he doesn’t even go to the edges, leaving swaths of canvas unpainted. In the middle of this is what looks like a black sun hovering — as if everything that Guston can empty out has been emptied out: except the truth. The implication of figure, ground, narrative, image. He’d reached Johns’s “helpless” place.

Guston must have known the return to figuration couldn’t be denied any more. And still he refused. He was in a battle of wills with his art. It must have been nightmarish. So much so that he stopped painting altogether for three years after the last canvas in this show. He didn’t show his work again until 1970. Critics had slammed that work as “displeasingly raw”; the canvases were said to have “unpleasant texture.” His colleagues were shocked, suspicious, and thought he was trying to hop on the Pop bandwagon; one painter friend asked why he had “to go and ruin everything.” Lee Krasner was said to find the work “embarrassing.” New York Times critic Hilton Kramer lambasted Guston as “a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum,” dismissing the work as “cartoon anecdotage … funky, clumsy and demotic,” and concluding “We are asked to take seriously his new persona as an urban primitive … and this is asking too much.” But the die was cast. While Pollock was the first to truly break through to pure non-objective painting, it was Guston who was the first to break out. And yet nobody seemed to understand. He’d risked everything and lost.

But Guston had crossed the Rubicon and was becoming the great painter of the American night. Not the night that follows day; the night of self. He said he wasn’t painting “pictures” but “one’s experiences and one’s enlargement of self.” Guston moved the sublime — the bigness of it all — away from abstraction where the Abstract Expressionists located it, away from nature where the 19th century placed it, off the ceilings of churches where it went in the Renaissance, and back, finally, to where it really is and probably has always been since it left the fires in the caves: The sublime is in us!To see that pictured brings Emerson’s “alienated majesty” back to us. Guston helped push everything aside, all the classicizing, romanticizing, philosophizing, or being a theologian of the sublime. This is epic. And it’s in all of Guston’s late work. Of his contemporaries, only the always generous de Kooning saw the real, deep content of Guston’s late art. He said that the subject of this art is “freedom.”

*The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Guston died at age 76. He was 66.

Reflections on Philip Guston
PHILIP GUSTON Painter, 1957 – 1967

One of today’s most influential painters is having his first museum-quality, posthumous show at Hauser & Wirth: Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967. It’s an exhibition that showcases a transitional decade, a gap that links his earlier, acclaimed abstract expressionist pictures and his later figurative, cartoonish works, which continue to resonate with many important artists of our day, including Dana Schutz, Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, and Katherine Bradford. In the works on view, we see Guston emptying himself. He leaves sumptuous color behind and simplifies his compositions, even temporarily abandoning painting in 1967 to draw. Philip Guston: Painter allows us to focus on the formal: the touch, the color, the composition.

With the knowledge that such moving, significant paintings are around the corner, it is difficult to look at this decade of painting without anticipating what is to come. Guston’s early use of pink, beginning in 1965, will be pushed forward in 1970, the color becoming more corporeal, more atmospheric, and more emotional. He will use it as both the sickly skin color of his figures and the walls behind them. Guston will shape the roughly rectangular, black forms that almost touch in his 1962 painting Untitled into recognizable shapes: shoes, cigarettes, shadows. He will use that same confident, fast, responsive brushwork that is non-referential in this decade to make his figures and their environments. He will tighten the stacking that is just becoming visible in May Sixty-Five or Reverse (both 1965): his paintings will soon feature glasses, people, cars, and shoes resting on tables, beds, streets, and floors.

But what does the viewer lose by understanding these paintings as merely transitional, as I have just done, or by contextualizing them as an attempt to reconcile “gestural and field painting, figuration and abstraction,” as the press release does? This rush to find hints of future paintings, or to triangulate them within different art historical genres, distracts from the painterly elements that create the rhythm and energy that make Guston’s work so exciting, so fresh, so contemporary. Without the striking, psychological, and emotionally resonant images that will come to define Guston’s late work, the formal qualities that make Guston’s work so compelling are easier to discern.

Touch: immediate, direct, responsive. He loads a two-inch brush with paint, and seemingly without hesitation, applies the paint with a consistent pressure to create a dense network of marks. In the earlier abstract paintings, (Rite (1957) and Painter (1959)), Guston nestles his forms close together, creating a claustrophobic, Soutine-like space packed with forms made with tight, impasto brushwork. The paintings are structural and architectural. But in the paintings from 1964 – 65, Guston’s brushwork becomes more open. The brush follows the extension of his arm. It registers the movement of his body.

Color: muted, close contrast. Guston insists that he is not a colorist, as Bonnard was, but a tonal painter, in the vein of Rembrandt, Goya, or Zurbarán. As articulate verbally as he was manually, Guston explained his transition to a more controlled color palette in one of the many wonderful excerpts collected in Hauser & Wirth’s exhibition catalogue:

Gray and black seems magnificent to me. And I guess, also, I want to see how much I can do with very little things. Very simple. Just two colors. I mean, white and black. And a brush. My hand. Nothing to paste on. I want to see if there’s anything left to express with the more elementary means. So far, I’ve found it very challenging and inexhaustible.1

For Guston, reduction of means allowed for expanded communication. In Portrait I (1965), his grays are inflected with the reds and pinks underneath, creating a color that feels less like a wall and more like air.

Composition: variations on a theme, awareness of the edge. Guston’s mid-career retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1962 proved crucial for his development. Never satisfied to continue thoughtlessly, Guston visited the Guggenheim every Monday, critiquing the nearly 100 abstract paintings that hung in the rotunda. The museum itself became, as he described, “an extension of my studio.” After the show ended he was “more ruthless” in his practice and began emptying the canvas not just of color, but of structured composition. In The Year (1964), he uses white to “erase” his blacks, creating the grays that surround his black forms, which he saw as objects of a kind. Throughout 1964 – 65, Guston repeated these one, two, or three black forms in slightly different places and in different sizes so that one can see the paintings as a continuum, aided by Hauser & Wirth’s installation. The density of these black forms contrasts with the openness of his edges, which he leaves as unpainted canvas, partly as a practical issue—at this point, he paints on unstretched surfaces—but also as a poetic one. The unpainted edges keep his paintings open and unfussy, allowing for breath. But they also complicate the relationship between image and surface: the painting seems to hover in front of the picture plane, but then an awareness of the unpainted edge locks the painting back in place.

Guston empties the canvas of color and compositional complexity so much that he reverts to drawing; more than fifty ink and charcoal works on paper hang on the final wall of the gallery. As fresh as they were in 1967, these drawings register Guston’s transition back to figuration (he was a WPA muralist in the 1940s). Here we see his recognizable hand: confident (indicated by the pressure he exerts on his material), yet wobbly. We see his openness to images, his humor and playfulness, and ultimately, his willingness to experiment his way forward.

Master Baffler: How Philip Guston Gave Form to Doubt

“Paul Valery once said that a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning,” Philip Guston told an interviewer in 1966, adding, “In a painting in which this is a room, this is a chair, this is a head, the imagery does not exist — it vanishes into recognition…. I want my work to include more.”

The abstractions on view at Hauser & Wirth contain much more than what we can see. Painted between 1957 and 1967, they culminated two earlier phases of Guston’s life’s work and previewed a final act that would leave many of his contemporaries despairing for him — and later viewers rapturous.

When Guston (1913–80) was about ten years old, his father committed suicide, and it was the youth who discovered the body hanging from a rafter. He reacted by escaping whenever he could into a closet with a single light bulb, spending hours drawing in solitude. His mother enrolled him, at thirteen, in a correspondence course from the Cleveland School of Cartooning, hoping to coax him out of his isolation. A couple of years later, in high school, he became friends with Jackson Pollock, and a teacher introduced the boys to Picasso, de Chirico, and other modernist painters; both students were ornery and were eventually expelled for distributing a leaflet satirizing the school’s elevation of sports over the humanities. By his early twenties Guston had become a skilled muralist, working first in Mexico, then California, and ultimately in New York City, where, at age 26, he won first prize for his mural Work – the American way, painted on the façade of the Works Progress Administration building at the New York World’s Fair.

In 1940 Guston completed another WPA mural, at the Queensbridge housing project, which exudes a hopeful earnestness through the community of musicians, basketball players, workmen, and roughhousing children depicted across its forty-foot expanse. But he was getting fed up with the government program — at one point federal inspectors ordered him down from his scaffold while they investigated the possibility that a dog’s tail curling around a boy’s leg in the Queensbridge mural (a composition inspired by Guston’s intensive study of Renaissance masters) might actually be a camouflaged hammer and sickle. More significantly, he was beginning to chafe against the aesthetic complacency of figuration at a time when his colleagues in the nascent New York School were struggling to find paths to abstraction beyond Picasso’s cubism, Kandinsky’s squiggles, and Mondrian’s geometries.

By the early 1950s, as Pollock was refining the explosiveness of his drip technique, Guston was atomizing his figures into fields of delicately tuned color. In 1966 he told another interviewer, “In the Fifties I entered a very painful period when I’d lost what I had and had nowhere to go. I was in a state of gradual dismantling.” His sense of being caught in limbo is manifested in those early abstractions as crosshatched clumps of color that dissipate into tinted fogs as they spread across a white tract.

In the later works on display here, ranging from two to seven feet across, those scattered clots of pigment have coagulated into forms that gain metaphysical heft from such open-ended titles as Fable II and Rite. With pink, red, orange, and green wedges parrying around black fulcrums, these two paintings (1957) feel as endlessly animated as the waltz of a Calder mobile. Painted with a wet-into-wet vehemence that pushes beyond Guston’s earlier elegance to achieve an earthy gusto, the images refuse to drift into biological allusion or cubist grid. Twinkling humor radiates from the rounded square with depending tail in Traveller III (1959–60), which levitates to the top of the composition like a balloon. Whether it is filled with helium or dialogue is an unanswerable question. In all of these works, Guston’s forms shamble up to the brink of representation (one might flash on the convolutions of the human brain in that scramble of orange and black brushstrokes) but inevitably shear off into abstraction. Narratives gibber behind the thrumming colors, visceral textures, and shifting proportions but never quite cohere. “Doubt itself becomes a form,” Guston told the poet Bill Berkson in 1964, and you can sense in these emphatic shapes the artist searching for a reason to let the classically derived figures he’d abandoned twenty years earlier re-emerge.

Guston mixed much of his color right on the canvas, but the smears here never degrade into mud. Instead, they positively glow. Quick struts of blue or crags of black partially obliterated by squalls of white create translucent layers as luminous as the sun through smoke (a haze that perpetually surrounded Guston, a chain-smoker — it is a rare photograph that doesn’t portray him with either cigarette or brush in hand). “What am I working with?” he once asked the composer Morton Feldman. “It’s only colored dirt.” And while Guston probably wasn’t grandiose enough to equate his own painting with fashioning Adam from dust — or even a golem from clay — he was tireless in trying to make something that had never existed.

That day came with Guston’s startling 1970 exhibition of galumphing cartoon paintings — those comical heads — which was nearly universally panned as willfully retrograde in an age when abstraction was already under assault from minimalism and conceptualism. John Perreault, writing in this newspaper, was one of the few critics to realize the breakthrough he was witnessing, a perspective that would be ratified more confidently by each generation: “It’s as if de Chirico went to bed with a hangover and had a Krazy Kat dream about America falling apart…a lot of people are going to hate these things, these paintings. But not me.”

Perreault was dead-on about the hatred that followed — Feldman and Guston’s friendship was actually destroyed by the cartoon paintings — but that coming pain and revelation was still unknown to the artist when he painted the abstractions in this show. He was working his way to surprising even himself, telling Berkson, “I want to end up with something that will baffle me for some time.”

The Chameleon Painter

Even in his most pared-down paintings, Philip Guston was digging for something new.

June 1, 2016

My wife and I had spent a good bit of time at the opening of “Philip Guston: Painter, 1957–1967,” the current exhibition (through July 29) at the Chelsea-docked starship that is the downtown Manhattan branch of the Hauser & Wirth gallery. Just as we were about to leave, I said, “Wait a minute—let’s not go just yet. I want to see something.” I’d noticed David McKee walking in, and I wanted to get a sense, if I could, of what the exhibition would look like reflected in his eyes.

McKee was Guston’s dealer from 1974 until the painter’s death in 1980, and afterward continued to represent his estate. In 1967, McKee was working at Guston’s previous gallery, Marlborough, just when Guston was producing the extraordinary array of drawings that cap the current show. In an interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, McKee explained that when he started working for Marlborough, Guston “was reluctant to have me visit, [saying:] ‘Well, it’s not going to be the sort of work that you’re expecting. My work has shifted.’” When McKee finally did visit the studio, he found it full of drawings of meager, abstract lines, like the ones now at Hauser & Wirth. Stark and powerful for all their obliquity, they seem oddly confident in their reduction of the Abstract Expressionist gesture to nearly zero. McKee saw something similar in the studio of another of Marlborough’s heavy hitters, Robert Motherwell, although his line, by contrast, was “extremely tentative.” McKee realized that both artists “had come to the conclusion that they’d exhausted the possibilities of their fifties and early sixties period. And were now curious about taking their work into other directions…. I never told the other what the other was doing. I couldn’t. It was like a secret that I held.”

Those drawings really were the end of something. When Guston took up painting again in 1968, he was making figurative work for the first time in nearly two decades. He had changed course completely. ( Well, maybe not completely: One of the first of the new figurative paintings, Paw, shows an animal appendage, rather than a human hand, drawing a stark horizontal line that might well be one of those in his 1967 drawings.) Raw and confrontational rather than cool and flashy, the new works showed the influence of comics but not of Pop. Instead of being shiny and new and void of the past, they were populated by Ku Klux Klansmen (a subject that Guston had painted years earlier, as a social realist in the 1930s) and haunting echoes of precursors from Piero della Francesca to Giorgio di Chirico by way of Krazy Kat. Fellow artists at the time responded coldly: They thought Guston had betrayed the cause of abstraction for which they had sacrificed so much. Guston had succeeded in scandalizing not the bourgeoisie, but the self-defined avant-garde. The critics were even crueler: Hilton Kramer’s verdict in The New York Times—that this was the work of “a mandarin masquerading as a stumblebum”—was only the most quotable censure. Guston’s contract with Marlborough was not renewed. Four years later, his new painting show inaugurated the McKee Gallery.

When his gallery shut its doors a year ago, McKee explained: “The art market has grown so vast that our gallery model is in danger: the collector’s private experience with art matters much less, as the social circus of art fairs, auctions, dinners and spectacle grows.” He went on to lament, “The value of art is now perceived as its monetary value. The art world has become a stressful, unhealthy place; its focus on fashion, brands and economics robs it of the great art experience, of connoisseurship and of trust.” For McKee, the epicenter of the new gallery model is Chelsea. In 2009, he remarked that he wouldn’t want “a big gallery in Chelsea” where “the spaces are anonymous, and they’re like cruise ships, where the captain doesn’t really know what’s going on in the ship…. I like a gallery to have a more intimate experience. And you know where if you want to sit and talk with a dealer, you can, who’s not going to kick you out.”

While McKee declined to adapt to the hypertrophy of the 21st-century art market, Hauser & Wirth—a sprawling enterprise with branches in Zurich, Los Angeles, London, and Somerset, England, as well as New York—is among the alpha galleries of the new environment, alongside Gagosian, David Zwirner, and others. Its Chelsea spaces are among the neighborhood’s biggest. The chances of being able to walk in and find Iwan Wirth minding the store and willing to sit down and schmooze about the work with you are close to nil. When McKee walked into the first-ever Guston exhibition in Chelsea (as well as the first with Hauser & Wirth), I was watching him look at art that he knew more intimately than almost any other living soul, and in a context more different than he might ever have expected. The look on his face was that of a man rather stunned—with dismay, or relief, or a little of both, I can’t say. I’d like to think that, without necessarily relinquishing his qualms about what the art business has become over the last 40 years, he was reconciled to seeing Guston in this new light by the evident care and respect with which the exhibition was prepared—no matter if it was installed in one those anonymous white caverns he never wanted for himself.

* * *

It’s often said that mega-galleries mount shows that might once have been the grand projects of museums, and that’s true. The point of an exhibition like “Philip Guston: Painter” isn’t merely to hang works on the wall that happen to be on the market (most of them probably aren’t); instead, the choices are based on serious art-historical considerations. Another such show is taking place nearby at Zwirner, through June 25: “Sigmar Polke: Eine Winterreise,” curated by the former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí. Like the Guston exhibition, it is not to be missed.

The Guston show really encompasses three distinct stages in his career. Early in the 1950s, his painterly touch was often considered a bit refined compared with some of his more swashbuckling colleagues. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, when this exhibition picks up the story, Guston’s mark starts to look blunter, more declarative; the paintings acquire a greater sense of the “objectness” of things. They are richly colored, with awkward, hard-won forms that clearly exhibit what Guston once called “an infighting in painting itself.” Then, in the mid-’60s, comes a reduction of color to mostly shades of gray, with loose, almost blowsy brushstrokes massing together to form simple, nebulous shapes. Finally come the drawings already mentioned, with their nearly zero-degree mark-making.

The coherence of the Hauser & Wirth show isn’t surprising, given that it was organized by one of America’s most respected curators, Paul Schimmel, the former longtime chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His involvement reflects yet another aspect of the changes afoot in the art world. In one of those strangely chiastic situations characteristic of the times, MoCA had hired art dealer Jeffrey Deitch as its director in 2010; Deitch and Schimmel didn’t see eye to eye, and two years later Schimmel either resigned or was fired, depending on whom you ask. Deitch himself didn’t last much longer in his new role and is now back running his gallery in New York. Schimmel left the nonprofit world to become a partner at the gallery whose Los Angeles branch is called Hauser Wirth & Schimmel.

For McKee, seeing Guston in this new context must have meant seeing his old friend’s work differently, for better or worse. I saw something almost completely new. That’s because I’d always thought of the essential Guston as the figurative painter of the 1970s. His abstract work was good, I knew, but mainly of interest as the precursor to greater work—an impression confirmed by the only large-scale Guston show I’ve ever had a chance to see, a rather skimpy retrospective at London’s Royal Academy of Art back in 2004. This present show has changed my view: Had the 1967 drawings that form the conclusion to it been the last works Guston ever made—had he retreated into silence, which could well have been the next logical step for him after those defiantly reductive works—we would still have to recognize Guston as one of the great artists of his time.

And yet, however logical—and despite Guston’s friendship with the apostle of silence, John Cage—silence was probably never in the cards for him. Even his most pared-down work was less about shedding the inessential than digging for something new. The search for fresh ingredients meant not only poring through the history of art, but also keeping an eye on younger painters. I don’t think it’s really true that in the late 1950s and ’60s, Guston was—as a gallery wall text claims—“very much removed from the public debate, apart and alone in his studio.” Could those final drawings ever have come into being without him having been aware of a younger artist like Cy Twombly, with his sparse mark-making? A group of paintings from 1964 to ’65, their gray and black lit up by a bit of pink, seems like an attempt to observe how much can be done by varying and redeploying the fewest possible elements, as if he’d been observing the kind of “systemic painting” that had been in the air (and would be the subject of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1966). In a 1966 interview with Guston, Harold Rosenberg pointed out how the paintings “have a great deal of resemblance to one another. Or let’s say a great deal of thematic continuity. It’s as if your paintings of the last three years were one long”—at which point Guston cuts him off, as if to avoid facing a verdict: One long what?

All the same, despite the seeming suddenness of Guston’s shift to figuration, hints that he was trying to go in that direction (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, trying to avoid an irresistible pull in that direction) are recurrent. They are most evident in the rather awkward work for which the Hauser & Wirth show is titled, Painter III (1963), in which the large central black oval is clearly enough the head of the painter whose brush-wielding hand can be made out just below. Looking (1964) gets its title from the eye-like marks that seem to face the viewer from the head-and-shoulders form on the painting’s right. Reverse (1965) anticipates the head in lost profile (with cigarette and smoke) of Guston’s 1978 Friend-To M.F. ( The composer Morton Feldman was one of the friends whom Guston thought had turned away from him in 1970.) Even earlier works like Fable II and Rite, both from 1957, earn their titles by the nonspecific figurative connotations of their bunched shapes; it would take only a little bit of further manipulation to turn those forms into the kind of stylized figures found in the paintings that Jan Müller was making around this time, or Bob Thompson just a little later. This was the period in which, as Frank O’Hara would write, Guston’s forms “pose, stand indecisively, push each other and declaim.” As early as 1961, the conservative New York Times critic John Canaday was wondering whether “in the end it should prove that he has really gone in a circle, carrying abstract expressionism back to its figurative start.” Just as Guston’s paintings explored the porous boundary between sameness and difference, his career was an essay in the single-mindedness of a chameleon.

In the Abstract

Art | Apr 2016 | BY Katy Diamond Hamer

Philip Guston in his New York City loft, 1957. Photo by Arthur Swoger

What do brushstrokes tell us about a painter? Similar to a written signature, those singular linear marks are unique to each individual, and can change over time. Case in point: a new Philip Guston exhibition at the New York location of Hauser & Wirth, which recently announced its exclusive worldwide representation of the estate of the painter, who died in 1980. The gallery’s premiere Guston show features a series of paintings and drawings dating from 1957 through 1967, a time when the artist was known specifically for his abstraction. Early in his career, Guston made narrative figurative paintings, often working with the WPA on large-scale murals. Then, as Hauser & Wirth Director Anders Bergstrom points out, “In 1950 he started painting completely abstractly and became well known for these works.”

Guston’s Position I, 1965

Curated by Paul Schimmel, “Painter” includes a series of pieces with a limited color palette consisting of earth tones: greys, muted blues, deep reds and greens. The artist moved paint around the surface in a varied yet seemingly specific way. Sometimes it goes to the edge of the work, such as in Fable II from 1957, an oil painting on illustration board. Often it’s possible to recognize the thought process of the artist as he applied his medium thickly by brush, working it with other colors on the piece itself rather than the palette. A few years later, Guston made Traveler III (1959-60), an oil painting on canvas containing a frenetic life energy.

Guston’s Last Piece, 1958

Most of the pieces on view in “Painter” were celebrated in a 1962 exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. After his death, in 2003, Guston received a major retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum, “but there were only maybe eight paintings that represented 1957 to ’67,” says Bergstrom. “We’re taking those years and blowing it up to 30-plus paintings. People will literally for the first time in 50 years be able to see this many works from that era in one place at one time.”

Guston’s Painter III, 1963

In the 1982 documentary Philip Guston: A Life Lived, he was asked a question about his stylistic evolution between 1962 and 1969. While slightly shrugging his shoulders and lighting a cigarette, he replied, “You work in this style or that style, as if you had a choice in the matter. What you are doing is trying to stay alive and continue and not die.” Guston’s later body of figure-based pieces, once reviled, has influenced a generation. But regarding the abstract paintings currently on view at Hauser & Wirth, the artist stated, “I recognize that they are dissolved and you don’t have figuration, but that’s really besides the point. What is to the point is that I’m in the same state [when making them]. The rest is not my business.”

Seeing David Hammons

Given that the artist is such a spectral presence, how can his multifarious oeuvre be summed up in a single retrospective survey?

September 21, 2016

David Hammons, The Wine Leading the Wine (c. 1969). (Bill Orcutt)

The most passionately discussed New York City gallery exhibition of last season might have been Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth, but the most talked-about one by a living artist was undoubtedly “David Hammons: Five Decades” at Mnuchin Gallery. Each of the two shows cast its own spell, one very different from the other, but both seemed to offer one emphatic if understated lesson to young artists: Keep your distance from the art world. Guston sought solitude by “painting a lot of other people out of the canvas,” as Harold Rosenberg put it in a conversation with him. Guston concurred: “People represent ideas…. But you have to paint them out. You know, ‘Get out.’” He told Morton Feldman that “by art I don’t mean the art world, I don’t mean lovers of art.” Lovers of art—people like me—might love it to death; what we love in art may not be what the artist needs from it. Guston once compared the art world to a country occupied by a foreign power.

Hammons is even more vehement. For him, not just the art world but art itself is suspect. “I can’t stand art actually. I’ve never, ever liked art,” he told the art historian and curator Kellie Jones in a 1986 interview that remains the most complete exposition we have of this notoriously unforthcoming artist’s philosophy. Claiming to have finally become “too old to run away from this gift,” and fascinated by the “outrageously magical things” that sometimes come of it, Hammons gave in, but without surrendering his reservations. Art should catch you unawares, he told Jones, preferably anywhere but in a gallery: “I like doing stuff better on the street, because the art becomes just one of the objects that’s in the path of your everyday existence. It’s what you move through, and it doesn’t have any seniority over anything else.” In a legendary 1983 performance, Hammons set up a sidewalk vendor’s space on Cooper Square, peddling snowballs that he arranged by size and priced accordingly.

The distance the artist has put between himself and the institutions dedicated to cultivating the appreciative penumbra around art has been not only intellectual but also, so to speak, tactical. He’s famous for making himself scarce. In her contribution to the “Five Decades” catalog, Alanna Heiss—the former director of PS1, where, in 1990–91, the largest exhibition of Hammons’s work appeared, curated by Tom Finkelpearl—­recalls that because the artist “refused to be available by telephone” while the show was being planned, “intricate systems were set up to contact him. The most familiar one I remember was that to meet him, you had to go to the corner of 125th Street by the Orange Julius stand and call a number. He would call you back, and come down and get you. Sometimes it would take a long time. Tom and I had long conversations about the show waiting for David to emerge from the protective cover of the Orange Julius sign.”

Guston and Hammons are hardly the only important artists whose legends are woven around their ambivalence or antagonism to the institutions of art, or rather to art as an institution. An important precursor for Hammons’s brand of found-object assemblage is the great Bruce Conner, whose retrospective, “It’s All True,” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through October 2. Conner once threatened to “quit the art business entirely,” and while he never quite succeeded, he made it as hard as he could for the art business to deal with his orneriness, which could also take the paradoxical form of pretending not to care. In 1963, he printed a card stating: “The bearer of this card is authorized to alter any collage or assemblage made by Bruce Conner which is displayed for public consumption.”

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Such haughtiness might seem risky to artists coming of age in the social-media era, where accommodation and availability are the minimal conditions for success. Or possibly not, since it’s Guston’s and Hammons’s refusal to assimilate—­and, of course, the eye-opening art that it made possible—that continues to inspire. But who gets to be inspired? Hammons has complained that “the art audience is the worst audience in the world. It’s overly educated, it’s conservative, it’s out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?” The paradox is that, at least for Hammons, dissing the art world turned out to be the best way of winning it over, and his art is no longer a denizen of the street but of the toniest galleries. When Hammons bites the hand that feeds him—and it feeds him very well; he’s one of the top 10 living American artists by auction price, and the piece that scored this record was auctioned not by a collector, but by the artist himself—the response is usually a swoon of pleasure. His first show with L&M Arts, Mnuchin Gallery’s predecessor, in 2007 featured fur coats despoiled with swaths of paint; it didn’t look like much to me, but lots of people waxed lyrical over the sublime nerve of scandalizing the posh uptown crowd by trashing their most precious apparel. No matter that there are always more minks to ranch and foxes to hunt, or that these coats had become even pricier with the swipe of a brush. That’s what counts uptown (and in most other places), isn’t it? So the joke was on whom exactly?

If that 2007 show was a one-liner, Hammons’s second show at what was still L&M, in 2011, was anything but. The artist had never been known as a painter—though I suppose his treatment of the fur coats could be seen, in retrospect, as an unorthodox example of that genre—but this was a painting show unlike any other. The works were big, bold, and brushy in a manner reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism—­or, I should say, so they seemed from what little one could glimpse of them, because they were mostly covered by torn black tarpaulins, plastic garbage bags, and the like. Was this a cruel joke on the market’s preference for painting? Some observers thought so, though given Hammons’s long-standing association with outstanding painters like Ed Clark and Stanley Whitney, that hardly seems likely. In fact, the hybrid three-dimensional constructions that he’d eked out of the dubious amalgamation of relatively traditional artistic means and grubby everyday stuff were nothing short of magnificent. Significantly, Hammons insisted that L&M break with convention by issuing no press release, but the works themselves spoke eloquently enough about how an artist need neither to renounce nor adhere to any aspect of his tradition (including the by-now-traditional rejection of tradition) in order for “outrageously magical things” to happen. With Hammons, they do, more often than not.

Delving even further back into Hammons’s exhibition history gives an even stronger sense of his unpredictability. At a 2002 show at the Ace Gallery in New York, “Concerto in Black and Blue,” the rooms were unlit, shrouded in darkness; visitors were given small blue flashlights so they could make their way through galleries empty of everything but whoever else was passing through. Roberta Smith elo­quently described the experience as “like being surrounded by Arctic fireflies or walking among faintly visible ghosts.” Given that Hammons is such a spectral presence himself, how can his multifarious oeuvre be summed up in a single retrospective survey? What could it mean to look back on five decades of work by someone convinced that being an artist means (as Hammons told Jones) “never liking anything he finds, in a total rage with everything, never settling or sacrificing for anything”?

At Mnuchin last spring, it meant, for one thing, last-minute changes to “Five Decades”—­and more changes made during the course of the show—that were much talked about in the art world. Apparently, Hammons decided as he was hanging the show to exclude some of the works that had already been loaned by important collectors—­an affront in itself—and substitute some small, cheaply framed photographic pieces, many of them documenting some of the more ephemeral works he’s done over the years.

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Is Hammons contrary for the hell of it? It would certainly jibe with his proclaimed admiration, as a younger man, for artists who “were like poets, you know, hated everything walking, mad, evil; wouldn’t talk to people because they didn’t like the way they loo